-NRLF 


SB    155    357 


GIFT   OF 
MICHAEL  REESE 


k 


THE«WORK90F 

JOHN  RUSKIN 

ITS  INFLUENCE  UPON  MODERN 
THOUGHT  AND  LIFE 

BY 
CHARLES    WALDSTEINi.e.\ 


NEW    YORK 

HARPER   AND   BROTHERS 


Copyright,  1893,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS 
All  rights  reserved, 


*  • 

•  • 


W/5 


MA  • 


TO 

H.  F.  B.  L. 

AND 

Go  tbe  Aemorg  of 
W.  R.  C. 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION I 

I.      RUSKIN    AS    A   WRITER   ON    ART 27 

II.      RUSKIN    AS    THE    FOUNDER    OF    PHENOMENOL- 
OGY  OF   NATURE 65 

III.  RUSKIN  AS    A    WRITER    AND    PROSE    PORT      .       .       88 

IV.  RUSKIN    AS    A    WRITER    ON  SOCIAL,   POLITICAL, 

AND   ECONOMICAL   QUESTIONS Ill 

V.      MR.   RUSKIN   AND  THE   SPORTS   AND    PASTIMES 

OF  ENGLAND 169 


CNIVERSIII  j 

^^^^  ;       ? 

THE  WORK  OF  JOHN'  RUSKIN 


INTRODUCTION 

^HE  claims  of  criticism  to  prac- 
tical utility  are  not  establish- 
ed beyond  a  doubt.  If  we 
run  our  eyes  over  a  list  of 
books  about  books,  of  criti- 
cal reviews  and  commentaries  on  the  pub- 
lished works  of  remarkable  men,  which 
every  day  seem  to  grow  in  bulk,  we  must 
at  times  have  asked  :  "  Is  it  not  a  mistake 
thus  to  block  up  the  way  between  the 
reading  public  and  the  great  books,  and 
to  occupy  any  portion  of  the  small  amount 
of  time  which  the  most  studious  can  hard- 
ly find  sufficient  to  devote  to  the  reading 
of  the  great  works  themselves  ?"  Even  in 
cases  where  the  abstruseness  of  the  sub- 
ject or  the  obscurity  of  style  in  the  writer 


might  make  some  commentary  accepta- 
ble, it  may  fairly  be  questioned  ;  whether 
it  be  not  better  for  the  reader  to  be  forced 
.to  make  ,the  salutary  effort  at  grasping 
,the  meaning'  p|c  &ny  writer  (in  himself 
worth  listening  to)  u'naided  by  paraphras- 
ing, in  the  process  of  which  much  of  the 
original  author  may  be  lost,  while  much 
may  be  acquired  from  the  transcriber, 
not  always  to  be  considered  gain  ? 

And  as  regards  the  critical  review  of 
the  works  of  great  men,  in  which  an  at- 
tempt is  made  at  assigning  to  each  work 
its  position  in  the  general  series  of  similar 
efforts,  of  throwing  light  upon  the  origin 
and  surrounding  causes  of  its  existence 
and  its  form,  and  finally  of  pointing  out 
what  is  good  and  what  is  bad,  what  is 
ephemeral  and  what  is  lasting,  what  ought 
to  be  confirmed  and  prolonged  in  its  ex- 
istence or  refuted  and  hastened  to  its 
descent  into  oblivion — in  one  word,  the 
sifting  of  the  literary  wheat  from  the  chaff 
— the  utility  of  even  this  function  of  liter- 
ary criticism  may  be  questioned.  The 
good  and  true  have  in  themselves  the 
power  of  vitality  and  persistency ;  while 


the  negative  character  in  the  bad  and  the 
untrue  is  the  weakness  at  the  very  heart 
of  such  work,  and  necessarily,  from  its 
own  nature,  leads  to  annihilation.  It  may 
thus  be  held  that  time  and  the  general 
reading  public  are  the  surest  and  fairest 
judges.  And  it  is  further  held  that  no  one 
man  in  one  given  period  of  time  can  be 
an  adequate  substitute  for  the  judgment 
of  the  reading  public  in  the  course  of 
ages.  However  many  instances  may  be 
adduced  in  support  of  this  doubt,  careful 
consideration  will  not  confirm  it  in  its 
absolute  form.  When  we  come  to  con- 
sider what  is  meant  by  "  time  "  and  the 
"general  reading  public,"  instances  abound 
in  which  the  verdict  referred  to  them 
cannot  be  recognized  as  unquestionably- 
just.  Time  is  a  very  elastic  term ;  and 
merit  has  been  known  to  sleep  unac- 
knowledged for  centuries,  until  at  last  it 
was  brought  into  recognition  by  the  trum- 
pet of  quickening  truth  and  justice.  We 
cannot  help  realizing  that  centuries  are 
a  very  long  time ;  and  it  must  make  us 
shudder  in  our  conscience  when  we  face 
the  possibility  that  there  are  many  works 


and  men  whose  merits  at  the  present  lie 
thus  unrecognized,  and  may  be  so  for- 
ever.* And  when  we  inquire  how  the 
trumpet  thus  awakened  them  from  sleep, 
we  find  that  it  was  sounded  by  one  man. 
In  the  reading  public  there  is  neither 

*  The  duty  to  remember  the  living  workers  can  hard- 
ly be  put  more  eloquently  than  has  been  done  by  Mr. 
Ruskin  himself  in  the  following  passage  from  Modern 
Painters  (vol.  i.,  end  of  chap,  i.) :  "  I  do  not  say  that  this 
veneration  is  wrong,  nor  that  we  should  be  less  atten- 
tive to  the  repeated  words  of  time :  but  let  us  not  forget 
that  if  honor  be  for  the  dead,  gratitude  can  only  be  for 
the  living.  He  who  has  once  stood  beside  the  grave,  to 
look  back  upon  the  companionship  which  has  been  for- 
ever closed,  feeling  how  impotent  there  are  the  wild 
love,  or  the  keen  sorrow,  to  give  one  instant's  pleasure  to 
the  pulseless  heart,  or  atone  in  the  lowest  measure  to  the 
departed  spirit  for  the  hour  of  unkindness,  will  scarcely 
.  for  the  future  incur  that  debt  to  the  heart,  which  can 
only  be  discharged  to  the  dust.  But  the  lesson  which 
men  receive  as  individuals  they  do  not  learn  as  nations. 
Again  and  again  they  have  seen  their  noblest  descend  to 
the  grave,  and  have  thought  it  enough  to  garland  the 
tombstone  when  they  had  not  crowned  the  brow,  and  to 
pay  the  honor  to  the  ashes  which  they  had  denied  to  the 
spirit.  Let  it  not  displease  them  that  they  are  bidden, 
amid  the  tumult  and  the  dazzle  of  their  busy  life,  to  lis- 
ten for  the  few  voices,  and  watch  for  the  few  lamps, 
which  God  has  toned  and  lighted  to  charm  and  to  guide 
them,  that  they  may  not  learn  their  sweetness  by  their 
silence,  nor  their  light  by  their  decay." 


unity  of  spirit  nor  force  of  initiative ;  but 
it,  for  the  most  part,  only  receives  rec- 
ognizable consistency  in  its  judgment 
through  the  leading  or  summarizing  pow- 
er of  one  critical  writer.  We  must  fur- 
ther realize  that  often  it  is  one  striking 
fault  or  one  palpable  and  salient  virtue 
which  engrosses  the  attention  of  the  read- 
ers who  judge,  the  adherents  who  follow, 
and  the  opponents  who  combat  the  whole 
varied  and  multiform  life-work  of  some 
great  man.  This  one  feature  is  then  sub- 
stituted for  the  whole  play  of  his  intellect- 
ual physiognomy  :  for  praise  or  for  blame, 
the  isolation  and  consequent  exaggera- 
tion of  one  side  of  a  man's  work,  that  may 
be  accidental  and  not  essential,  counter- 
act just  appreciation,  or  at  best  retard  it 
indefinitely.  Finally,  the  workers  them- 
selves are  not  always  able  to  indicate  by 
due  proportion  and  emphasis  what  in 
their  life-work  is  essential  and  what  is 
accidental.  When  we  carefully  consider 
and  weigh  all  that  these  questions  sug- 
gest, we  cannot  help  thinking  that  there 
is  a  call  upon  those  who  conscientiously 
feel  themselves  qualified  for  the  task,  to 


lead  or  to  direct  the  judgment  of  the 
reading  public,  and  to  interfere  with 
the  course  of  fatalistic  and  indifferent 
time. 

Still  graver  doubts  may  be  felt  as  re- 
gards the  propriety  or  advisability  of  deal- 
ing critically  with  the  work  of  a  living 
man.  Good  taste,  on  the  one  hand,  is  in 
danger  of  being  affected  by  the  personal 
character  which  might  be  assumed  by 
contemporary  criticism ;  while,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  claim  of  time  might  be 
still  more  strongly  urged  as  a  necessary 
agent  in  giving  due  proportion  to  merit 
and  influence.  Yet  even  here  we  feel 
that  historical  fatalism  and  intellectual 
laissez  faire  may  retard  the  certainty  of 
progress.  It  will,  in  every  case,  greatly 
depend  upon  the  amount  of  obvious  im- 
portance which  such  work  actually  has 
before  we  determine  whether  it  is  desir- 
able to  fix  and  to  confirm  its  existence 
by  insisting  upon  what  is  good  and  by 
pointing  out  what  is  not.  If  only  criti- 
cism is  not  personal,  but  dispassionate 
and  sincere,  it  can  but  lead  to  a  strength- 
ening and  a  support  of  good  work.  The 


price  of  immortality  is  contemporary  crit- 
icism. 

This  is  the  spirit  in  which  the  writer 
proposes  to  approach  his  subject,  which 
(considering  the  general  spread  of  a  de- 
sire for  artistic  education,  and  the  impor- 
tant position  which  in  this  respect  Mr. 
Ruskin  has  held,  holds,  and  will-  hold)  ap- 
pears worthy  of  critical  treatment  in  the 
present  day. 

In  dealing  with  John  Ruskin  at  all,  we 
must,  from  the  very  outset,  be  aware  that 
we  are  dealing  with  a  striking  personality 
and  with  a  great  life-work.  To  sum  these 
up  positively  and  shortly,  we  should  say 
that  the  central  feature  of  the  greatness 
of  the  personality  consists  in  the  bold  in- 
stance he  presents  of  a  man  who  has 
dared  to  live  his  thoughts.  And  if  we 
should  feel  that  there  are  inconsistencies 
in  his  life,  these  do  not  arise  from  the 
usual  cause  of  such  inconsistency,  name- 
ly, the  discrepancy  or  contradiction  be- 
tween practice  and  profession,  between 
the  actual  course  and  the  theory  of  life : 
when  mystical,  ascetic,  and  other-worldly 


preachers  shine  in  the  ball-room  and  spec- 
ulate on  the  stock-exchange ;  when  phi- 
losophers, historians,  and  scients,  whose 
vision  penetrates  down  to  the  principles 
of  all  things,  soars  over  countless  ages 
in  the  history  of  nations,  and  traces  the 
links  that  bind  things  animate  and  inani- 
mate together,  crouch  before  an  ephem- 
eral prejudice  or  fashion  ot  a  petty  lo- 
cality ;  and  when  economists  and  social 
reformers  pen  the  gospel  of  socialism  over 
oysters  and  champagne.  If  Ruskin's  life 
appears  inconsistent,  the  contradictions 
are  to  be  sought  for  in  his  thoughts  and 
theories. 

The  positive  aspect  of  his  work,  and 
the  debt  which  England,  and  through  it 
the  civilized  world,  owes  to  him,  might 
be  summed  up  in  the  following  survey : 

The  great  change  which  appears  to 
have  been  effected  in  the  history  of  con- 
temporary civilization  in  England  during 
the  generation  preceding  our  own  is  to  be 
found  mainly  in  the  diffusion  of  culture, 
or  at  least  of  a  desire  and  need  for  it, 
among  the  mass  of  the  middle  and  lower 
classes,  owing  to  changes  in  the  condi- 


tions  of  these  classes,  physical,  political, 
and  social,  which  in  their  previous  state 
maintained  the  aristocratic  constitution 
of  Britisli  society.  Culture,  in  its  refined 
form,  was  in  England  the  possession  of 
one  section  of  the  nobility  and  of  the 
higher  professional  and  literary  classes; 
and  its  possession  was  here  more  exclu- 
sively confined  to  this  limited  group  than 
in  any  other  of  the  occidental  countries 
of  Europe.  The  other  sections  of  the 
community,  as  well  as  those  members  of 
the  nobility  and  gentry  in  the  country 
who  were  addicted  chiefly  to  field  sports* 
or  whose  means  did  not  permit  of  the 
acquisition  of  a  library  and  of  frequent 
visits  to  the  metropolis,  as  well  as  the 
bulk  of  the  merchant  class  and  the  trades- 
men, whose  type  Dickens  has  fixed,  only 
possessed  for  the  satisfaction  and  suste- 
nance of  their  spiritual  and  intellectual 
life  of  higher  emotions  the  ministrations 
and  usages  of  the  Church.  And  the 
higher  educational  institutions,  such  as 
the  universities,  which  in  Germany,  to- 
gether with  the  national  theatres,  devel- 
oped the  secular  side  of  moral  life  and 


supplemented  the  religious  education  from 
their  completely  emancipated  position, 
were  in  England,  if  not  quite  an  ancillary 
appendage  to  the  Church,  at  least  direct- 
ly subject  to  her  influence.  While,  on 
the  one  hand,  this  absorption  on  the  part 
of  the  Church  of  the  higher  side  of  moral 
and  artistic  life,  and  the  exclusive  sway 
which  she  exercised  for  centuries,  have 
retarded  the  domestication  of  these  in- 
dependent forms  of  civilization  as  such, 
she  has,  on  the  other  hand,  in  her  modi- 
fied form,  nurtured  these  needs  in  the 
hearts  of  the  people.  We  must,  for  in- 
stance, recognize  that  the  Puritanic  wave, 
which  might  have  completely  submerged 
and  dissipated  the  current  of  popular 
music  among  what  I  venture  to  consider 
a  naturally  musical  people,  was  to  a  cer- 
tain degree  arrested  in  its  destructive 
advance  by  the  opportunities  which  the 
Church  offered  for  the  continuous  study 
and  progressive  flow  of  English  church 
music.  Thus,  while  popular  and  secular 
music  have  continuously  degenerated,  and 
have  been  repressed  into  the  shallow  re- 
gions of  vulgarity  and  false  sentiment,  to 


our  present  day  of  a  promising  revival, 
the  compositions  of  English  church  music 
manifested  an  unbroken  strong  vitality, 
in  which  not  even  the  tyrannical  and  ex- 
clusive reign  of  the  giant  Handel  could 
quite  extirpate  a  native  characteristic 
force.  At  the  same  time,  furthermore, 
under  its  protection,  with  all  classes  of 
Englishmen  the  appreciation  for  music 
(though  narrow)  has  been  fostered,  and 
the  ability  to  sing  intelligently  has  been 
given  to  vast  numbers  in  whom  other- 
wise such  an  accomplishment  would  not 
have  been  expected.  The  same  may  ap- 
ply to  the  interest  in  architecture,  which 
appears  to  me  to  be  more  wide-spread  in 
an  intelligent  form  among  all  classes  of 
Englishmen  than  in  any  other  country. 
While  it  is  thus  undoubtedly  the  case, 
that  the  Church  in  England  has  been, 
and  is  still  for  the  greater  part  of  its  pop- 
ulation, the  only  means  of  sustaining  or 
reviving  the  higher  needs  of  culture  and 
of  providing  a  flower-garden  amid  the 
endless  monotony  of  fields  for  the  pro- 
duction of  bread  -  stuff  and  moors  for 
grouse -shooting,  the  fact  remains  that, 


owing  chiefly  to  her  influence,  the  classes 
referred  to  have  been  and  are  still,  in 
their  intellectual  education,  in  the  variety 
and  diversity  of  their  moral  resources, 
and  in  their  appreciativeness  of  the  prod- 
ucts of  literature,  science,  and  art,  far  be- 
low the  bourgeoisie  of  Germany.  With- 
in the  last  decades  a  marked  change  has 
taken  place  in  this  respect.  <  The  middle 
classes  in  the  country  and  in  the  towns, 
and  even  large  portions  of  the  laboring 
classes,  have  in  every  direction  mani- 
fested their  desire  for  the  acquisition  of 
the  higher  fruits  of  culture,  and  have 
made  heard  their  claim  to  share  in  the 
birthright  which  previously  had  been  as- 
signed but  to  the  few.  Nay,  the  strength 
of  the  movement  has  been  so  great,  its 
impetus  has  been  so  powerful  and  rapid, 
that,  as  is  so  often  the  case,  it  may  tem- 
porarily have  overshot  its  proper  mark, 
and  landed  in  the  district  that  lies  be- 
yond the  boundaries  of  sincerity  and 
moderation,  the  sphere  of  the  grotesque 
and  ridiculous.  Yet  we  may  venture  upon 
the  paradox  that  no  movement  is  really 
progressing  unless  it  can  occasionally  be 


laughed  at,  that  no  social  or  political  in- 
novation can  be  made,  unless  the  rapid- 
ity of  its  advance  has  been  occasionally 
checked  in  a  salutary  degree  by  the  pow- 
erful pages  of  that  important  teacher 
Punch.  Amid  the  numerous  causes  which 
might  be  adduced  for  the  consummation 
of  this  great  change  in  English  life,  the 
direct  efforts  of  individual  men  must  be 
noted,  and  among  these  I  hold  that  no 
two  men  have  been  as  efficient  in  their 
work  as  Matthew  Arnold  and  Ruskin. 
Of  the  nature  of  Mr.  Ruskin's  work  in 
this  direction,  of  its  faults,  and  at  the 
same  time  its  peculiar  effectiveness,  I 
shall  treat  in  the  succeeding  portions  of 
this  essay. 

Another  distinctive  characteristic  mark- 
ing the  life  of  the  English  people  in  the 
present  day  is  the  growing  feeling  of  eco- 
nomical responsibility.  It  manifests  itself 
in  the  extension  of  the  laws  of  morality, 
which  had  hitherto,  as  it  were,  been  only 
valid  for  and  applicable  to  the  domestic 
life,  or  the  life  of  disinterested  social  in- 
tercourse, to  the  spheres  of  economical 
life.  And  this  movement  has  penetrated 


into  the  body  of  economical  theory  itself, 
and  has  made  those  views  of  writers  on 
this  subject,  who  but  a  short  time  ago 
put  economy  and  ethics  as  absolutely  dis- 
tinct if  not  opposed  spheres,  appear  com- 
pletely antiquated.  But  though  the  inner 
development  of  economical  study  and  the 
reaction  against  the  Manchester  school 
may  have  contributed  to  this  salutary 
change  in  economical  doctrine,  the  change 
is  not  entirely  the  outcome  of  theoretical 
study,  but  has  mainly  been  caused  by  the 
final  introduction  into  theory  of  what 
practically  has  been  a  constant  growth  in 
the  moral  organization  of  social  life  in 
England.  Here  again  the  causes  for  this 
change  have  been  numerous  and  varied, 
but  the  efforts  of  individuals  can  be  dis- 
cerned ;  and  among  them  we  may  (in 
spite  of  some  of  his  economical  theories) 
point  to  the  spirit  in  the  work  of  Mill 
himself,  to  the  influence  of  Kingsley  and 
Maurice,  to  the  works  of  George  Eliot, 
and  to  the  main  spirit  of  the  preaching 
of  Ruskin. 

As  he  has  been  a  contributor  to  the 
general  advance  in  the  intellectual  and 


social  life  of  England,  he  has  to  a  still 
higher  degree  been  an  active  factor  in 
producing  a  change  in  the  more  special 
sphere  of  art.  It  is  here  that  he  of  all 
men  has  been  the  most  prominent  in 
bringing  about  a  diffusion  of  the  taste 
for  art  among  the  classes  previously  re- 
ferred to,  and  that  he  has  greatly  elevated 
the  standing  of  the  profession  of  an  artist 
itself.  On  the  one  hand  we  must  con- 
sider (judging  from  past  personal  experi- 
ence, or  present  inference  based  upon  the 
study  of  the  picture  the  literary  records 
give  us,  and  the  extant  traces  and  sur- 
vivals) the  dryness  and  joylessness  of  the 
domestic  life  among  the  greater  number 
of  the  English  people  fifty  years  ago,  the 
vulgarity  of  taste,  the  meanness  or  taw- 
driness  of  domestic  architecture  and  dec- 
oration, the  wanton  ravages  and  destruc- 
tion of  the  great  monuments  of  man's 
life  and  artistic  efforts  in  past  ages.  On 
the  other  hand  we  must  become  aware 
of  the  fact  that  now,  at  least  the  desire 
for  artistic  decoration  (not  always  rightly 
guided),  for  the  adornment  of  houses, 
for  the  preservation  of  artistic  remains, 


i6 


has  penetrated  through  all  classes ;  that 
the  homes  of  the  merchant,  the  trades- 
man, the  city  clerk,  and  even  the  artisan, 
all  make  some  pretence  and  manifest 
some  desire  towards  the  raising  of  their 
tastes,  and  the  consequent  embellishment 
of  their  surroundings  ;  that  even  the  ath- 
letic undergraduate  haunts  the  curiosity- 
shop  ;  that  not  only  the  Academy  exhibi- 
tion in  London  but  those  of  provincial 
towns  form  an  important  staple  of  con- 
versation (not  always  judicious  or  even 
sincere)  for  so  large  a  portion  of  the  com- 
munity. When  we  compare  these  facts  we 
cannot  help  but  realize  the  great  change 
that  has  come  over  English  life.  And 
this,  again,  is  in  great  part  due  to  the  ef- 
forts of  John  Ruskin,  and  of  some  other 
workers,  like  William  Morris. 

Ruskin  has  done  much  in  raising  the 
appreciation  of  art  in  general,  more  espe- 
cially the  art  of  painting,  most  in  bring- 
ing into  proper  prominence  the  depart- 
ment'of  landscape  -  painting.  This  de- 
partment was  not  appreciated  sufficiently, 
and  even  now  is  not  valued  enough  by 
the  greater  number  of  people,  as  compared 


with  third-rate  works  of  historical  and  of 
genre  painting. 

It  is  difficult  to  estimate  how  much 
Ruskin  has  done  directly  for  the  artists 
themselves  in  the  pursuit  of  their  voca- 
tion. But  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  he 
has  powerfully  impressed  upon  them  the 
seriousness  and  responsibility  of  their  life- 
work,  and  has  raised  their  enthusiasm ; 
that  he  has  done  much  to  deepen  and 
elevate  the  general  tone  prevailing  among 
them,  which  often,  among  the  followers  of 
that  high  craft,  tends  towards  social  disso- 
nance. He  has  waged  relentless  warfare 
against  the  fetich  of  false  genius  erected 
on  the  central  height  of  the  international 
country  of  Bohemia.  He  has  opposed 
the  fatal  superstition  that  the  positive 
power  of  artistic  inventiveness  was  in- 
creased and  intensified  by  an  unsocial  in- 
dulgence, by  a  life  that  differed  in  its  ap- 
pearance and  in  its  laws  of  conduct  from 
those  that  hold  good  for  all  members  of 
a  well-organized  society  possessed  of  dig- 
nity —  the  superstition  which  caused  a 
second-rate  painter  to  taunt  the  simple 
violin-maker  Stradivarius  with  the  com- 


parison  of  their  pursuits— in  mouthing 
that 

"higher  arts 

Subsist  on  freedom — eccentricity — 
Uncounted  inspirations — influence 

That  comes  with  drinking,  gambling,  talk  turned  wild, 
Then  moody  misery  and  lack  of  food — 
With  every  dithyrambic  fine  excess : 
These  make  at  last  a  storm  which  flashes  out 
In  lightning  revelations.     Steady  work 
Turns  genius  to  a  loom;  the  soi^l  must  lie 
Like  grapes  beneath  the  sun  till  ripeness  comes 
And  mellow  vintage." 

He  has  thus  contributed  his  share  in 
giving  to  the  painter  of  England  the 
somewhat  exceptional  social  position 
which  he  holds,  owing  to  the  general  es- 
timate the  public  has  of  his  profession, 
which  makes  him  a  highly  respected  mem- 
ber of  the  community. 

A  further  great  merit  of  Ruskin,  and 
one  for  which  the  world  cannot  be  suffi- 
ciently grateful  to  him,  is  found  in  the 
fact  that  he  has  opened  out  to  many,  who 
would  otherwise  not  have  been  possessed 
of  it,  the  appreciation  of  Turner.  It  may 
perhaps  be  wrong  to  suppose  that  the 
merits  of  Turner  were  unrecognized  when 
Ruskin  wrote  his  brilliant  defence  of  him. 


That  this  could  not  have  been  entirely 
the  case  is  perhaps  borne  out  by  the  sim- 
ple fact  of  the  material  success  he  had  as 
a  painter,  coupled  with  the  exceptionally 
early  age  at  which  he  was  admitted  into 
the  body  of  the  Royal  Academicians,  and 
the  two  hundred  and  forty  paintings  he 
exhibited  on  the  walls  of  the  Royal  Acad- 
emy. Still  the  fact  remains  that  the  new- 
ness and  boldness  of  the  departure  in 
landscape-painting  did  not,  and  does  not 
always  even  now,  make  him  easily  acces- 
sible to  the  greater  number  of  people 
whose  standards  of  taste  are  based  upon 
and  developed  by  the  canons  of  art  con- 
tained in  the  landscapes  of  previous  mas- 
ters, and  who  are  not  in  the  habit  of  care- 
fully and  lovingly  observing  nature  in  her 
broad  features  and  in  her  varied  changes. 
Yet,  I  hold  that  no  man,  not  even  he  who 
is  by  nature  and  circumstance  prepared 
to  appreciate  works  of  art,  and  in  the 
habit  of  so  doing,  can  approach  the  works 
of  Turner  after  he  has  read  Ruskin  with- 
out having  his  perceptive  sense  quicken- 
ed, so  that  new  beauties  and  truths  are 
manifest  to  him  that  were  before  hidden. 


And  this  faculty  of  appreciating  Turner, 
which  becomes  a  lesson  in  the  more  care- 
ful observation  of  all  landscape-painting 
— nay,  all  pictures  and  works  of  art — has 
been  strengthened  and  widened  by  Rus- 
kin  in  the  guidance  which  he  gives  for 
a  revived  and  intensified  observation  of 
nature  herself  in  a  new  spirit  and  with  a 
new  method. 

It  is  here  that  I  believe  Ruskin's  great- 
est achievement  is  to  be  found,  and  one 
with  which  his  name  will  ever  have  to  be 
associated.  He  has  endowed  man  with 
a  new  habit  of  mind,  and  has  laid  the 
foundation  for  a  new  class  of  observation, 
which  I  believe  to  be  midway  between 
science  and  art,  or  rather  overlapping 
into  both.  I  shall  call  this  new  intel- 
lectual discipline  Phaenomenology  of  Nat- 
ure. It  is  the  summing-up  of  a  scale 
of  effort  beginning  with  Byron,  passing 
through  Shelley  and  Wordsworth,  and 
leading  to  Ruskin,  strongly  modified  and 
directed,  on  the  one  hand,  by  the  pre- 
dominant wave  of  observation  in  modern 
natural  science,  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
by  the  development  of  landscape-painting^ 


especially  since  Turner.  I  do  not  mean 
that  in  Ruskin  the  ultimate  consumma- 
tion of  this  method  of  observing  nature 
has  been  reached  ;  on  the  contrary,  I  con- 
sider his  merit  to  consist  in  the  founding 
of  it.  But  I  believe  that  the  promises  it 
gives,  if  pursued  in  the  course  he  has  in- 
dicated, while  perhaps  it  may  never  be 
accompanied  by  the  power  and  beauty  of 
his  eloquence  of  exposition,  has  not  been 
fully  realized  by  those  who  have  consid- 
ered it  purely  from  the  point  of  view  of 
art  or  purely  of  science. 

This  power  of  eloquence  and  expression 
brings  us  to  the  last  point,  in  which  the 
undoubted  virtue  of  Ruskin  will  always 
call  for  the  gratitude  of  the  English-speak- 
ing nations.  Jrle  appears  to  me  the  great- 
est of  English  prose  poets.  And  if  his 
writing  be  criticised  as  prose  for  its  being 
too  much  like  poetry,  and  as  poetry  for 
evading  its  definite  forms  in  being  clad  in 
the  apparel  of  prose,  this  merely  means, 
as  has  ever  been  the  case,  that  our  cri- 
teria of  what  is  admissible  or  praise- 
worthy are  too  narrow  or  not  sufficiently 
numerous,  that  new  tests  will  have  to  be 


applied  to  new  things,  and  that  those 
whose  tastes  have  been  formed  exclusive- 
ly on  old  standards,  will  have  to  enlarge 
their  sympathies  and  to  adapt  themselves 
to  the  new  objects  they  would  appreciate 
or  judge. 

These  are,  to  my  mind,  the  main  posi- 
tive deeds  and  works  for  which  the  world 
is  indebted  to  Ruskin,  and,  as  such,  they 
have  the  power  of  prevailing,  and  it  is  to 
be  hoped  will  be  justly  recognized.  I 
have  here  singled  out  what  I  consider  to 
be  the  main  features  of  the  good  he  has 
done,  and  I  have  not  attempted  to  weigh 
accurately  the  influence  which  his  work 
has  had  and  may  have  upon  contempo- 
rary life  and  thought.  To  do  this  at  all 
adequately  requires  a  fuller  critical  ex- 
amination, which,  from  its  difficulty,  must 
call  forth  the  diffidence  of  him  who  un- 
dertakes it.  There  is  hardly  a  figure  in 
the  history  of  contemporary  thought  in 
England  the  intellectual  and  social  influ- 
ence of  which  it  is  so  difficult  to  gauge 
as  that  of  John  Ruskin.  This  difficulty 
is  owing  to  the  complex  nature  of  his 


work  and  of  his  personality.  With  the 
latter  we  are  only  concerned  in  so  far 
as  it  throws  light  upon  the  work,  as  the 
knowledge  of  it  is  merely  derived  indi- 
rectly from  the  character  of  his  work,  or 
more  directly  in  what  he  himself  has  per- 
mitted us  to  see  in  his  published  confes- 
sions, and  in  so  far  as  through  his  work, 
or  in  connection  with  it,  it  influenced  men. 
The  difficulty  of  forming  a  just  esti- 
mate of  the  influence  of  Mr.  Ruskin, 
owing  to  the  complexity  of  his  work,  is 
to  be  found,  first,  in  the  variety  of  sub- 
jects with  which  he  has  dealt,  ranging 
over  most  of  the  important  spheres  that 
actuate  human  life  ;  secondly,  in  the  fact 
that,  within  this  width  of  range,  the  mark- 
ed distinction  which  generally  serves  to 
classify  intellectual  workers  into  two 
broad  groups,  namely,  the  practical  and 
•  /  theoretical,  does  not  hold  good  in  his 
case.  For  his  activity  lays  claim  to  both 
spheres.  And  the  complication  is  in- 
creased by  the  fact  that,  when  he  himself 
claims  to  be  theoretical  or  scientific  (and 
in  the  superficial  appearance  of  it  is  so), 
there  is  an  actual  predominance  of  the 


practical  or  ethical  aim,  not  only  as  the 
immediate  motive  and  ultimate  goal  of 
his  endeavor,  but  constantly  interfilleted 
and  interwoven  with  the  theoretical  tis- 
sue, and  often  interfering  with  and  con- 
fusing its  consistency,  and  diminishing  or 
destroying  its  unity  of  structure  and  effec- 
tive service.  On  the  other  hand,  the  man- 
ifestly practical  works  often  suffer  from 
an  apparent  and  obtrusive  predominance 
of  preconceived  general  maxims,  resting 
upon  foundations  the  materials  for  which 
seem  to  be  drawn  out  of  the  domain  of 
pure  theory,  and  thus  have  not  upon  them 
the  impress  of  the  sympathetic  observa- 
tion of  practical  life.  In  addition  to^hese 
broader  recognizable  causes  of  complexity, 
there  are,  in  each  separate  department 
and  individual  instance  of  his  work,  simi- 
lar intricacies  and  often  confusions  in 
the  detailed  elaboration  of  tasks  and  prob- 
lems, which  at  times  make  any  attempt 
at  a  just  appreciation  of  the  work  (not  to 
speak  of  an  estimate  of  its  influence)  ap- 
pear almost  hopeless.  There  is  much 
that  is  good  absolutely ;  still  more  that  is 
good  when  severed  from  its  general  con- 


text ;  more  still  that  is  admirable  when 
considered  as  an  individual  flash  of  in- 
spiration or  thought  or  description ;  and 
much  that  is  bad,  merely  because  of  the 
false  position  in  which  it  is  put ;  even 
some  things  that  are  bad  absolutely. 
And,  throughout,  the  student  or  sympa- 
thetic reader  (and  the  two  ought  to  be 
synonymous)  feels  that  he  ought  con- 
stantly to  shift  his  position  and  alter  his 
focus  in  viewing  and  considering  the  con- 
nected portions  of  any  given  work,  look- 
ing upon  a  part  as  a  piece  of  sober  criti- 
cism and  philosophy,  wltile  the  apparent 
next  link  in  tlTe  chain  ought,  if  real  jus- 
tice were  done  it,  to  be  considered  a 
painting  transcribed  into  words,  or  a  poem, 
or  a  portion  of  a  sermon,  or  a  fairy  tale. 
And  one  must  feel  that  true  justice  would 
only  be  done  to  the  works  of  Ruskin  if, 
with  infinite  labor,  some  sympathetic  and 
congenial  spirit,  possessed  of  much  so- 
briety and  system,  were  to  rearrange  the 
whole  of  the  works,  and  to  distribute 
passages  taken  from  them  all  under  new 
heads,  with  a  simple,  intelligible,  and  or- 
derly classification. 


In  attempting  to  estimate  Ruskin's/in- 
fluence,  we  must  needs  be  critical  of  his 
work.  Nor  do  I  in  any  way  propose, 
even  if  I  were  fitted  for  it,  to  attempt  the 
task  of  reorganization  suggested  above. 
But  for  our  purpose  it  is  necessary  to 
view  the  man  and  his  work  under  several 
heads. 

First,  then,  I  shall  consider  Ruskin  as 
a  writer  on  art ;  second,  as  the  founder 
of  the  phaenomenology  of  nature ;  third, 
as  a  writer  and  prose  poet ;  fourth,  as  a 
writer  on  social,  political,  and  economical 
questions ;  and  finally,  I  shall  endeavor 
to  give  a  summary  of  the  influence  of  his 
work  and  of  the  example  of  his  life,  as  he 
has  made  them  manifest  to  the  public. 


RUSKIN  AS  A  WRITER  ON  ART 

RUSKIN'S  strongest  points  and  greatest 
achievements  are  not,  I  maintain,  to  be 
found  in  the  domain  of  the  theory  and 
criticism  of  art.  Though  he  has  shown 
himself  to  be  possessed  of  the  most  re- 
fined power  of  observation  and  apprecia- 
tion of  even  hidden  beauties,  I  believe 
that  this  appreciation  and  refinement  of 
taste  are  directed,  on  the  one  hand,  more 
to  nature,  on  the  other,  more  to  the  ethi- 
cal world ;  and  that  art  as  such  does  not 
respond  to  the  natural  bent  of  his  mind. 
He  is  primarily  a  lover  and  minute  ob-  / 
server  of  nature  and  a  moral  preacher ; 
and  the  predominance  of  these  two  atti- 
tudes of  mind  often  stands  in  the  way  of 
the  right  understanding  of  art.  Before 
we  begin  to  consider  Ruskin's  general 
theory  of  art,  I  must  point  to  two  acci- 


28 


dental  impediments  which  would  increase 
the  difficulty  of  his  constructing  a  sound 
theory  of  art.  The  one  is  to  be  found  in 
the  accepted  common  meaning  or  deno- 
tation of  the  term  art  in  England  ;  the 
other,  in  the  accidental  origin  and  re- 
stricted purpose  of  Ruskin's  first  general 
book  on  art,  perhaps  his  greatest  work, 
namely,  Modern  Painters! 

Many  people  in  England,  when  they 
speak  of  art,  merely  have  in  their  minds 
paintings  and  painters,  many  include 
sculpture,  many  architecture ;  but  few  go 
beyond  this.  It  is  perhaps  due  to  the 
concrete  and  inductive  spirit  of  the  Eng- 
lish people,  which  has  also  manifested 
itself,  I  believe  harmfully,  in  the  restrict- 
ed use  of  the  term  science  in  ordinary 
parlance,  commonly  used  as  synonymous 
and  coextensive  with  natural  science,  in- 
cluding, perhaps,  the  so-called  exact  sci- 
ences. That  art  includes  not  only  the 
formative  arts,  such  as  painting,  sculpt- 
ure, and  architecture,  but  also  all  forms 
of  music  and  poetry,  down  to  the  very 
novel — in  fact  all  man's  work  so  far  as 
it  is  directly  meant  to  produce  aesthetic 


29 

pleasure — is  not  present  to  the  minds  of 
most  people  when  they  use  the  term.  At 
all  events,  the  predominance  which  is 
given  to  painting  in  any  consideration  of 
art  is  very  marked,  and  this  general  use 
of  the  term,  which  has  not  been  effective- 
ly altered  by  those  who  have  written  on 
the  theory  of  art,  has  limited  and  nar- 
rowed and  often  distorted  the  range  of 
vision  of  critics,  and  has  vitiated  the 
soundness  of  general  theory  at  the  very 
first  approach  to  the  main  problems. 

The  accidental  fact  that  Ruskin's  gen- 
eral and  most  fundamental  work  on  art 
dealt  predominantly;  not  only  with  paint- 
ing, but  chiefly  with  one  side  of  painting, 
and  that  it  had  a  fixed  immediate  apolo- 
getic aim  of  vindicating  the  right,  not 
only  of  modern  painters  in  general  as  op- 
posed to  their  classic  predecessors,  but 
of  one  great  modern  painter  in  especial, 
Turner,  has,  I  believe,  hampered  him  in 
his  general  views  on  art  ever  after,  even 
f,  by  disposition  and  training,  he  had 
been  more  fitted  to  solve  with  the  sub- 
lime sobriety  of  well-balanced,  systematic 
thought  the  great  problems  of  aesthetics. 


3° 

The  first  fact  which  he  who  would  at- 
tempt to  elaborate  a  systematic  theory  of 
art  must  constantly  bear  in  mind  is  that 
he  is  dealing  with  the  theory  of  art,  and 
not  with  art  itself;  that  he  is  aiming  at 
the  complete  and  systematic  apprehen- 
sion of  facts  which  are  to  satisfy  the  need 
and  craving  for  truth,  and  not  with  the 
creation  of  that  which  is  to  produce  aes- 
thetic pleasure  and  satisfy  man's  need  for 
beauty.  The  confusion  of  the  spirit  in 
which  we  are  to  approach  the  theory  of  a 
pursuit  with  the  spirit  of  the  pursuit  itself 
is  most  easily  made  and  most  fatal  in  its 
results.  In  other  words,  the  temptation 
is  always  great  on  the  part  of  the  art 
theorist  or  critic  (and  the  expectant  atti- 
tude of  the  public  with  regard  to  his  work 
increases  this  danger)  to  cast  aside  the 
measured  sobriety  of  analysis  required  for 
criticism  and  the  establishment  of  theory 
the  moment  the  subject  with  which  he  is 
dealing  happens  to  partake  of  the  emo- 
tional nature  of  artistic  creation.  It 
must  be  confessed  that  the  attitude  of 
mind  of  a  writer  on  the  theory  and  criti- 
cism of  art  is  no  more  that  of  a  painter, 


poet,  or  musician  than  that  of  a  historian 
carefully  sifting  his  facts  from  all  avail- 
able records  is  that  of  a  general  fighting 
a  battle,  or  than  that  of  a  zoologist  study- 
ing the  nature  and  development  of  animal 
form  is  that  of  a  breeder  of  cattle.  Yet 
the  main  attitude  of  mind  actuating  the 
writer  on  the  theory  of  art  is  to  be  the 
same  as  that  of  the  sound  historian  or 
biologist,  however  different  the  objects 
with  which  they  deal  may  be  among  each 
other,  and  he  must  equally  guard — nay, 
from  the  nature  of  his  subject,  must  be 
more  on  his  guard — against  the  easy  in- 
sinuation of  alien  interests  and  tempt- 
ing forms  of  inaccurate  diction.  He  must 
study  carefully  and  minutely  the  nature 
of  man's  aesthetic  feelings  and  the  causes 
which  produce  them,  and  must  consider 
with  equal  thoroughness  the  common 
features  of  man's  works  whose  chief  pur- 
pose it  is  to  appeal  to  these  feelings.  He 
may  have  to  ask  himself  whether  there 
are  any  universally  accepted  and  intelli- 
gible causes  for  these  feelings,  whether 
art  and  the  beautiful  are  not  purely  a 
matter  of  more  or  less  individual  taste  or 


32 

opinion,  whether  aesthetics  is  not  purely 
what  Plato  called  86ga,  or  whether  there 
is  any  universally  admitted  ground  for  it, 
making  it  what  Plato  would  call  eViori^ij. 
Then,  having  ascertained  that  art  does 
not  rest  upon  mere  individual  taste  and 
opinion,  but  is  grounded  upon  the  funda- 
mental constitution  of  man's  senses  and 
emotion  and  intellect,  in  tjieir  normal  and 
sane  development,  he  must  set  to  work, 
by  a  very  wide  but  none  the  less  careful 
and  exhaustive  analysis,  induction,  and 
even  experiment,  to  examine  man's  nat- 
ure and  his  work  in  their  relation  to  har- 
mony, beauty,  or  art ;  and  he  must,  above 
all,  always  hold  before  his  eyes  the  su- 
preme aim,  upon  which  all  his  powers 
ought  to  be  jealously  concentrated,  of  ar- 
riving at  the  truth,  and  nothing  but  the 
truth,  independent  of  all  other  or  further 
considerations.  This  will  in  itself  be  a 
high  moral  act,  pleasing  to  God. 

Now  it  is  in  this  necessary,  fundament- 
al, and  leading  attitude  of  mind  that  Rus- 
kin  fails,  from  the  very  outset,  in  dealing 
with  the  theory  of  art;  and  the  radiation 
from  this  false  centre  of  vision  has  put 


out  of   focus   many  of  the   points  with 
which  he  deals  in  detail. 

According  to  him  all  art  is  revelation 
and  all  art  is  praise.  This  at  once  gives 
a  religious  bias  to  scientific  investigation, 
I  call  it  bias,  because  considerations  that 
might  be  introduced  ultimately,  when  the 
main  facts  have  been  established,  are  here 
prematurely  presented,  thus  fatally  re- 
tarding and  distorting  the  just  apprehen- 
sion of  the  facts  themselves.  From  a 
purely  religious  point  of  view  all  actions 
may  be  and  ought  to  be  viewed  in  their 
relation  to  eternity,  to  the  wholeness  of 
the  universe,  and  to  God  ;  and  it  may  be 
right,  for  some  habitually,  and  for  others 
occasionally,  to  dwell  upon  and  to  ponder 
over  this  higher  interrelation  of  things 
and  acts.  But  this  is  none  the  truer  of 
art  than  it  is  of  science  or  politics,  or  even 
of  the  acquisition  of  wealth.  Yet  our 
progress  would  surely  -be  retarded  if  we 
distracted  our  attention  from  the  indi- 
vidual thing  we  were  doing,  and  directed 
it  towards  the  ethical,  metaphysical,  or 
theological  considerations  of  its  possible 
ultimate  bearings.  The  task,  in  itself 

3 


34 


arduous,  of  the  scientific  apprehension  of 
relations  that  subsist,  or  that  may  exist, 
between  a  complicated  variety  of  things, 
is,  to  say.  the  least,  not  furthered  by  the 
introduction  of  that  which  is  still  remoter, 
more  incomprehensible,  and  incapable  of 
demonstrable  test.  And  we  must,  above 
all,  be  ever  mindful  of  the  fact  that  the 
insinuating  obtrusivenesa  of  the  personal 
equation  is  more  likely  to  assert  itself 
successfully  in  these  remote  and  ultimate 
regions  of  thought  than  in  the  nearer  and 
more  familiar  fields  of  pure  scientific  in- 
quiry. The  solution  of  the  main  prob- 
lems of  art  is  as  little  advanced  by  the 
introduction  of  theological  considerations 
as  the  cause  of  biology  or  chemistry  would 
be  furthered  by  it.  George  Eliot's  violin- 
maker,  in  the  pride  of  his  humble  craft, 
was  fully  conscious  of  the  godliness  of  his 
good  work  when  he  said  : 

"  My  work  is  mine, 

And,  heresy  or  not,  if  my  hand  slacked 
I  should  rob  God — since  He  is  fullest  good — • 
Leaving  a  blank  instead  of  violins. 
I  say,  not  God  himself  can  make  man's  best 
Without  best  men  to  help  Him.     I  am  one  best 
Here  in  Cremona,  using  sunlight  well 


To  fashion  finest  maple  till  it  serves 
More  cunningly  than  throats  for  harmony. 
'Tis  rare  delight:  I  would  not  change  my  skill 
To  be  the  Emperor  with  bungling  hands, 
And  lose  my  work,  which  conies  as  natural 
As  self  at  waking." 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  he  knew  that 
whatever  his  hand  found  to  do  he  was  to 
do  it  with  his  might,  and  not  to  dissipate 
his  strength  by  looking  for  praise  or  rev- 
elation ;  and  as  the  aim  of  his  art  was  to 
make  the  best  violins  from  the  point  of 
view  of  violin-making,  or,  at  most,  violin- 
playing,  the  praise  was  contained  in  the 
good  violins  as  violins,  and  not  in  any 
way  as  indirect  and  obscure  sermons  or 
songs. 

"And  as  my  stomach,  so  my  eye  and  hand, 
And  inward  sense  that  works  along  with  both, 
Have  hunger  that  can  never  feed  on  coin. 
Who  draws  a  line  and  satisfies  his  soul, 
Making  it  crooked  where  it  should  be  straight? 
An  idiot  with  an  oyster-shell  may  draw 
His  lines  along  the  sand  all  wavering, 
Fixing  no  point  or  pathway  to  a  point; 
An  idiot  one  remove  may  choose  his  line, 
Straggle  and  be  content ;  but  God  be  praised 
Antonio  Stradivari  has  an  eye 
That  winces  at  false  work  and  loves  the  true, 


With  hand  and  arm  that  play  upon  the  tool 
As  willingly  as  any  singing  bird 
Sets  him  to  sing  his  morning  roundelay, 
Because  he  likes  to  sing  and  likes  the  song.'* 

I  therefore  say  that  Ruskin  premature- 
ly introduces  religious  and  ethical  consid- 
erations, and  in  dealing  with  the  theory 
of  art  he  does  not  direct  all  his  concen- 
trated forces  towards  the  answering  of 
the  question  "what  is  true?"  but  "what 
is  holy,"  or  "good,"  or  "good  for,"  or 
better,"  or  "  worse  ?" 

The  results  of  this  make  themselves 
felt  from  the  very  outset.  He  will  not  go 
dispassionately  to  the  foundation  of  hu- 
man feelings  and  the  earliest  and  simplest 
sensations  of  man,  not  only  in  his  highest 
state  of  civilization,  but  in  his  crudest 
stage  of  intellectual  development.  He 
appears  to  dwell  with  reluctance  upon  the 
nature  of  sensation,  and  he  dislikes  the 
very  term  itself,  substituting  theoria  for 
aisthesis.  For  him  the  early  sensations 
are  not  the  simple  fundamental  factors 
with  which  the  theorist  has  to  deal  dis- 
passionately ;  but  they  are  viewed  in  the 
light  of  the  moral  teacher  to  whom  they 


37 

are  the  lower  as  compared  with  the  higher 
thoughts  and  feelings,  which  latter  often 
really  are  mystical  and  fanciful  rhapso- 
dies. His  fundamental  and  introductory 
chapters  on  the  theory  of  art,  in  Part  III. 
of  the  second  volume  of  Modern  Painters, 
are  either  rhetorical  (often  very  beautiful) 
preachings,  or  attempts  at  defining  "the 
distinctions  of  dignity  among  pleasures 
of  sense."  The  really  fundamental  ques- 
tions concerning  the  nature  of  our  sense- 
perceptions  in  their  relation  to  our  feel- 
ings of  form  and  beauty  he  slurs  over 
hastily  in  a  few  pages,  and  then  takes  up 
his  favorite  strain  in  dealing  with  "the 
temper  by  which  right  taste  is  formed," 
rather  than  with  the  real  question,  what 
right  taste  is  or  ought  to  be.  It  surely 
brings  us  no  further  to  say  that  "  we  may 
indeed  perceive,  as  far  as  we  are  acquaint- 
ed with  the  nature  of  God,  that  we  have 
been  so  constructed  as  in  a  healthy  state 
of  mind  to  derive  pleasure  from  whatever 
things  are  illustrative  of  that  nature."  If 
he  could  undertake  soberly  and  adequate- 
ly to  define  the  nature  of  God,  we  might 
then  test  the  healthy  state  of  man's  mind 


by  it.  But  this  he  does  not  do.  In  the 
same  chapter  (Book  II.,  chap,  iii.)  he  brings 
the  problem  to  a  point :  "  Hence  there 
arise  two  questions,  according  to  the  sense 
in  which  the  word  right  is  taken — the  first, 
in  what  way  an  impression  of  sense  may 
be  deceptive,  and  therefore  a  conclusion 
respecting  it  untrue;  and  the  second,  in 
what  way  an  impression  of  sense,  or  the 
preference  of  one,  may  be  a  subject  of 
will,  and  therefore  of  moral  duty  or  delin- 
quency." To  the  first  of  these  (a  really 
fundamental  one)  he  devotes  a  short  para- 
graph, referring  us  to  "  the  common  con- 
sent of  man  "  (which  man,  or  men,  or  race, 
or  age?).  But  the  second  question  ad- 
mits of  preaching,  and  he  dwells  upon  it 
with  fervent  eloquence. 

This  religious  bias  manifests  itself  fur- 
thermore in  the  mystical  tendency  appar- 
ent in  his  headings  and  subdivisions.  Take, 
for  instance,  his  types  of  beauty :  "  Infin- 
ity, or  the  Type  of  Divine  Incomprehensi- 
bility ;  Unity,  the  Type  of  Divine  Compre- 
hensiveness ;  Repose,  the  Type  of  Divine 
Permanence ;  Symmetry,  the  Type  of  Di- 
vine Justice ;  Purity,  the  type  of  Divine 


Energy  "  (why  not  Divine  Purity  ?) ;  "  Mod- 
eration, the  Type  of  Government  by  Law." 
This  mystical  admixture  vitiates  the  char- 
acter of  his  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture, 
in  which  much  is  said  of  real  value,  while 
in  the  "  Lamp  of  Sacrifice,"  forming  the 
first  chapter,  it  leads  him  to  the  most  ab- 
surd jugglery,  from  the  artistic  and  his- 
torical point  of  view.  Nay,  we  cannot  help 
feeling  that,  even  from  a  theological  point 
of  view,  his  formalistic  mysticism  has 
often  led  him  away  from  the  moderation 
of  good  taste  into  serio-comic  niceties 
which  remind  us  of  one  of  the  class  of  in- 
judicious preachers  who  thought  he  had 
found  a  good  example  of  gratitude  in  the 
brute  creation  when  he  referred  to/the 
duck  that  looks  up  to  thank  its  Afaker 
when  drinking  water,  whereas  this  invol- 
untary movement  depends  entirely  upon 
the  formation  of  its  throat.  But  it  makes 
itself  felt  in  its  disturbing  influence  even 
in  his  definite  estimate  of  technical  as- 
pects of  landscape  -  painting,  as,  for  in- 
stance, the  importance  he  attaches  to 
luminous  backgrounds  of  pictures  as  sug- 
gestive or  expressive  of  infinity.  This 


leads  him^to  say  (Modern  Painters,  II., 
chap,  v.)  that  he  knows  "  not  any  truly 
great  painter  'of  any  time  who  manifests 
not  the  most  intense  pleasure  in  the  lu- 
minous space  of  his  backgrounds,  or  who 
ever  sacrifices  this  pleasure  where  the 
nature  of  his  subject  admits  of  its  attain- 
ment, as,  on  the  other  hand,  I  know  not 
that  the  habitual  use  of  dark  backgrounds 
can  be  shown  as  having  ever  been  con- 
sistent with  pure  and  high  feeling,  and, 
except  in  the  case  of  Rembrandt  (and 
then  under  peculiar  circumstances  only), 
with  any  high  power  of  intellect." 

It  is  owing  to  this  theory  of  art  as  a 
revelation  that  I  believe  Ruskin  has  for- 
mulated his  own  theory  with  regard  to  the 
relation  between  art  and  nature ;  though, 
perhaps,  the  zeal  with  which  he  defended 
Turner  against  the  charge  of  violating  in 
his  paintings  truth  to  nature,  which  gave 
a  stimulus  to  his  first  effort  in  his  art 
writings,  may  have  had  some  influence 
in  thus  fixing  his  views.  To  Ruskin  the 
function  of  art  is  to  be  the  intermediator 
between  man  and  nature,  or  rather  is  to 
reveal  to  man  the  divine  spirit  in  nature. 


The  great  artist  is  he  who  cag  thus  per- 
ceive most  fully  this  divine  spirit  which 
pervades  the  world,  and  who  has  the  pow- 
er of  reproducing  adequately  the  revela- 
tion thus  made  to  him,  and  of.  enabling 
other  denser  souls  to  be  pervaded  with, 
and  illumined  by,  this  heaven-born  light. 

It  is  exceedingly  difficult  to  ascertain 
exactly  what  is  Ruskin's  theory  of  the  re- 
lation of  art  to  nature.  It  would  be  easy 
to  show  that  he  holds  different  views  at 
different  times,  continually  contradicting 
one  another.  But  I  believe  it  would  be 
fairest  to  him  and  to  his  work  to  put  in 
simple  terms  what  I  consider  his  principal 
view,  and  the  one  most  in  keeping  with 
the  best  he  has  said  on  other  topics. 

To  him  nature  is  pervaded  with  the 
divine  spirit,  and  there  is  no  evil  in  her. 
He  is  distinctly  teleological.  There  is,  he 
believes,  always  a  divine  spirit  in  nature, 
provided  only  we  do  not  interfere  with 
her,  and,  as  artists,  have  the  power  of  dis- 
cerning it.  Now  the  true  artist  is  he  who 
can  thus  perceive  the  divine  element  in 
nature  most  fully,  and  his  function  is  to 
enable  others,  by  means  of  his  work,  to 


42 


perceive  this  spirit,  which  otherwise  they 
could  not  apprehend.  The  artist  is  most 
likely  to  fulfil  this  supreme  function  if 
he  studies  nature  simply,  earnestly,  and 
truthfully,  reproduces  adequately  what  he 
thus  sees,  and  does  not  cast  the  "  dark 
shadow  of  himself  and  his  personality 
over  her,"  attempting  "  to  improve  upon 
nature." 

Now,  even  granting  his  teleological 
premise  that  all  nature  is  pervaded  with 
this  divine  spirit,  which  is  ever  good  and 
beautiful,  and  that  the  supreme  task  rests 
with  the  artist  in  discerning  and  repro- 
ducing it,  we  are  then  but  at  the  beginning 
of  the  whole  problem  of  art  and  its  rela- 
tion to  nature.  For  the  different  artists, 
in  search  of  this  divine  spirit,  will  see  it 
in  different  parts  and  lights  and  aspects, 
according  to  their  personal,  moral,  intel- 
lectual, or  artistic  characters ;  and  even 
the  same  artist  will  see  a  different  spirit 
in  the  same  scene  in  his  varying  moods, 
or  under  the  different  aspects  which  he 
chooses  to  accentuate.  A  Titian,  a  Rem- 
brandt, a  Turner,  a  J.  F.  Millet,  may  all 
have  believed,  or  claimed,  to  have  seized 


43 

the  divine  revelation  in  the  nature  they 
reproduced.  But  surely  the  spirit  of  the 
work  lay  in  this  personal  element  which 
they  added  or  infused,  the  unity  of  soul 
which  welded  together  into  a  necessary 
whole  the  infinite  multiplicity  of  phe- 
nomena before  them  and  the  innumerable 
possibilities  of  scenes  to  be  reproduced. 
What  makes  it  art  is  this  human  organi- 
zation of  the  facts  of  nature.  Or  may 
not  this  be  considered  the  really  divine 
element,  breathed  by  God  through  man's 
best  effort  into  inanimate  or  insentient 
nature  ? 

Ruskin  and  many  others  have  made 
the  mistake  of  attempting  to  solve  the 
fundamental  principle  of  all  art  in  deal- 
ing with  painting  or  with  any  imitative 
art.  Ruskin  himself  {Modern  Painters, 
II.,  chap,  i.)  has  once  stated  that  architect- 
ure is  not  so  pure  an  art  as  sculpture  and 
painting,  because  of  the  alien  considera- 
tions of  construction  and  utility  mixing 
with  the  "  theoretic  "  or  aesthetic  side  of 
art.  On  similar  grounds  I  maintain  that, 
for  the  discovery  of  the  principles  of  all 
art,  those  arts  which  reproduce  known 


44 

forms  of  nature,  such  as  sculpture  and 
painting,  and  must  thus  appeal  fully  and 
powerfully  to  man's  sense  of  truthful  ap- 
prehension and  comparison  before  they 
can  act  upon  or  satisfy  his  sense  of  form 
and  harmony,  are  not  so  likely  to  yield 
satisfactory  results  as  the  more  purely 
decorative  arts  and  the  early  forms  of 
music,  and  are  not  so  clearly  expressive 
of  man's  artistic  instinct.  But  to  this 
sober,  and  on  the  face  of  it  humble,  point 
of  departure  Ruskin's  impetuous  or  impa- 
tient flights  of  inspiration  and  enthusias- 
tic rhetoric  will  not  descend.  To  ascer- 
tain the  fundamental  principle  of  art,  we 
proceed  more  safely  the  less  the  art  is 
imitative,  and  appeals  to  truth  as  well  as 
beauty,  or  to  beauty  through  truth.  I  do 
not  mean  to  say  that  art  ends  there ;  on 
the  contrary,  it  rises  and  grows  more 
complex,  appealing  to  all  the  highest 
thoughts  and  aspirations  as  it  mixes  with 
truth  and  goodness.  But  for  the  discov- 
ery of  its  fundamental  principles,  the  early 
traces  of  man's  creative  artistic  efforts — 
nay,  their  origin  in  the  constitution  of 
the  human  senses — are  the  only  safe  field 


45 

of  investigation.  It  is  only  as  these  are 
studied  dispassionately  and  thoroughly 
that  we  arrive  at  the  true  principles  un- 
derlying our  highest  artistic  experiences. 
Ruskin  is  thus  necessarily  not  quite 
clear  in  his  conception  of  the  distinction 
between  art  and  science  when  he  illus- 
trates their  difference  in  saying  that  "  sci- 
ence informs  us  that  the  sun  is  ninety- 
five  millions  of  miles  distant  from  and 
one  hundred  and  eleven  times  broader 
than  the  earth,  that  we  and  all  the  planets 
revolve  round  it,  and  that  it  revolves  on 
its  own  axis  in  twenty-five  days,  fourteen 
hours,  and  four  minutes.  With  all  this 
art  has  nothing  whatever  to  do.  It  has 
no  care  to  know  anything  of  this  kind. 
But  the  things  which  it  does  care  to 
know  are  these  :  that  in  the  heavens  God 
has  set  a  tabernacle  for  the  sun,  which  is 
as  a  bridegroom  coming  out  of  his  cham- 
ber, and  rejoiceth  as  a  strong  man  to  run 
a  race.  His  going  forth  is  from  the  end 
of  the  heaven,  and  his  circuit  unto  the 
ends  of  it;  and  there  is  nothing  hid  from 
the  heat  thereof."  Art,  according  to  him, 
does  not  only  deal  with  truths  of  aspect, 


46 


but  its  main  function  is  to  discover  truths 
of  essence,  and  hence  it  is  much  vaster  in 
its  field  and  scope,  as  the  soul  is  larger 
than  the  material  creation.  This  is  fair 
neither  to  science  nor  to  art.  Science  is 
chiefly  concerned  with  the  truths  of  es- 
sence, the  inner  constitution,  causes  of 
change,  origin,  future  destiny  of  objects 
that  lie  below  what  can  actually  be  per- 
ceived by  the  senses.  Above  all,  the 
causes  of  existence  and  change  are  the 
true  province  of  science.  Art,  on  the 
other  hand,  does,  above  all,  deal  with  the 
form  and  aspect  of  things ;  and  there  is  a 
soul  and  spirit  to  be  found  in  this  aesthet- 
ic side  of  things,  as  it  is  to  be  found  in 
their  scientific,  philosophical,  ethical,  and 
religious  side. 

This  being  Ruskin's  conception  of  the 
relation  between  art  and  nature,  we  can 
quite  understand  how  he  sets  as  the  su- 
preme task  of  the  artist  the  realization 
of  truth  ;  and  though  he  widens  out  the 
term  truth  to  comprehend  much  that 
would  ordinarily  be  summarized  under  a 
different  head,  still  he  is  enabled  often  to 
go  to  the  very  root  of  things,  and  to  de- 


stroy  many  superstitions  and  fallacies 
that  have  prevailed  in  criticism,  and  that 
have  misdirected  practice.  Still,  the  fact 
remains  that  the  ultimate  aim  of  science 
is  truth,  the  ultimate  aim  of  art  is  the 
production  of  aesthetic  pleasures  by  means 
of  what  we  must  at  present  call  harmony 
or  beauty.  This  harmony,  corresponding 
to  a  fundamental  need  and  longing  for 
design  and  order  in  the  human  mind, 
rooted  in  the  nature  and  development  of 
man's  simplest  sensations,  and  growing 
and  flowering  into  his  highest  spiritual 
aspirations,  man  wishes  to  project  into 
nature,  and  to  realize  in  the  confused  web 
of  the  multitudinous  disordered  events 
in  life  that  crowd  in  upon  his  attention. 
In  his  artistic  efforts  he  is  thus  driven  to 
select,  rearrange,  or  compose  things  and 
facts  in  nature  in  accordance  with  the 
need  of  this  essential  quality  of  his  own 
mind.  But  we  can  quite  well  understand 
how  Ruskin  is  strongly  opposed  to  this 
view  of  its  being  the  function  of  art  to 
select,  or,  as  he  would  call  it,  to  improve 
upon  nature  ;  and  it  is  one  of  the  leading 
features  of  his  personality,  no  doubt  influ- 


encing  also  his  social  and  political  views, 
that  he  has  a  sacred  horror  of  the  act  of 
man's  hand  in  defiling  nature  as  she  is. 
Still,  as  regards  art,  it  would  be  nearer 
the  truth  to  say  that  man's  artistic  efforts 
have  their  origin  in  his  opposition  to  nat- 
ure than  in  his  following  her,  though 
both  would  be  overstated.  But  should 
Ruskin's  view  of  the  position  of  truth  in 
art  hold  good,  however  he  may  choose 
to  define  truth,  the  necessary  and  consist- 
ent consequence  would  lead  him  to  mi- 
nute and  accurate  photographic  reproduc- 
tion as  the  highest  consummation  of  art, 
however  much  he  would  be  the  first  to 
shrink  from  and  condemn  such  a  result. 
He  would  certainly  be  astonished  to  find 
that  the  same  fundamental  principles  are 
adopted  by  Zola,  and  have  served  him  as 
the  theoretical  justification  of  the  aber- 
rations in  his  work.  Zola  makes  his  au- 
thor speak  with  a  fervor  and  a  largeness 
of  vision  and  power  of  diction  which  do 
justice  to  that  view.  "  No,  no  ;  they  do 
not  know  ;  they  ought  to  know.  ...  I, 
every  time  that  a  professor  tried  to  force 
truth  upon  me,  felt  the  opposition  of  mis- 


49 

trust  in  thinking, '  He  is  mistaken,  or  is 
misleading  me.'  Their  ideas  exasperate 
me ;  it  appears  to  me  that  truth  is  wider 
than  all  that.  .  .  .  Ah !  how  beautiful  it 
would  be  to  give  one's  whole  existence 
to  a  work  in  which  one  would  endeavor 
to  put  things  and  animals  and  man,  the 
immense  arc,  not  in  the  order  of  the  phil- 
osophical manuals,  according  to  the  stu- 
pid hierarchy  in  which  our  pride  cradles 
itself,  but  in  the  full  flow  of  universal  life, 
a  world  in  which  we  should  only  be  an 
accident,  where  the  dog  that  passes,  nay, 
down  to  the  stone  on  the  road-side,  would 
supplement  and  explain  our  existence,  in 
short,  the  great  all,  without  high  or  low, 
without  soiled  or  clean,  just  as  it  lives 
and  has  its  function  !  .  .  .  Surely  to  sci- 
ence the  novelists  and  poets  must  turn ; 
she  is  to-day  the  only  possible  source. 
Ah !  but  what  are  we  to  take  from  her, 
how  walk  beside  her  ?  I  immediately  feel 
that  I  flounder.  .  .  .  Ah !  if  I  knew  how, 
if  I  knew  how,  what  a  series  of  books  I 
should  fling  at  the  head  of  the  mob !" 
Yes,  indeed,  if  one  knew  how  to  deal  with 
truths.  But  here  begins  the  whole  task 


of  art.  And  he  makes  his  truth -loving 
painter  say :  "  Ah  !  life,  life  !  To  feel  her 
give  herself  in  her  reality,  to  love  her  for 
her  own  sake,  eternal  and  ever  changing, 
not  to  have  the  foolish  idea  of  ennobling 
her  in  enfeebling  her,  to  realize  that  the 
would-be  uglinesses  are  only  juttingsforth 
of  character,  and  to  cause  to  live,  and  to 
make  men,  the  only  way  of  being  a 
god  !" 

Be  all  this  as  it  may,  with  regard  to 
Ruskin's  general  theory  and  much  of  its 
application,  the  fact  remains  that  in  his 
chapters  on  truth  he  has  succeeded  in 
setting  a  new  standard  in  many  depart- 
ments of  what  with  a  barbarous  word  we 
might  call  the  typology  of  nature.  He 

has  shown  for  all  times,  for  instance,  that 

% 

man  and  animals  and  costumes  and  build- 
ings are  not  the  only  subjects  which  de- 
serve careful  observation  and  adequate 
rendering  by  the  painter,  but  that  the 
configuration  of  the  soil,  and  the  profile 
of  mountains,  and  the  different  trees  and 
shrubs  and  flowers,  nay,  leaves  and  twigs, 
have  all  a  distinct  character  that  has  a 
claim  upon  our  careful  attention,  and 


ought  to  be  adequately  rendered,  and  not 
caricatured,  in  a  painting. 

He  justly  calls  our  attention  to  the  fact 
that  we  all  turn  in  indignation  from  a 
painter  who  draws  a  horse,  even  in  the 
background  of  his  picture,  so  that  we 
might  mistake  it  for  a  man  or  a  cow  or 
a  rock,  while  in  many  much-admired  pict- 
ures by  old  masters  trees  and  rocks  have 
not  only  been  robbed  of  their  individual- 
ity, but  endowed  with  a  monstrous  com- 
pound character  made  up  of  the  unintel- 
ligible confusion  of  traits  belonging  to 
different  bodies.  We  must  feel  that  the 
more  the  observing  power  of  the  public 
grows  in  this  direction,  fostered  by  the 
higher  standards  of  truth  in  the  landscape- 
painters,  or  forcing  them  to  raise  their 
standard,  the  higher  will  the  art  of  land- 
scape-painting grow  in  this  direction,  not 
only  with  regard  to  correct  drawing,  but 
also  with  regard  to  the  treatment  of  light 
and  shade  and  color,  freeing  these  from 
the  restricting  bondage  of  a  uniform 
studio  light. 

The  introduction  of  the  elements  which 
thus  disturb  the  purely  scientific  spirit  of 


52 

his  inquiry  (all  of  which  may  be  summed 
up  in  the  phrase,  the  intrusion  of  the  per- 
sonal equation)  has  also  diminished  the 
value  of  Ruskin  as  a  historian  of  art.  In 
fact  it  is  here  that  his  range  of  sympa- 
thies is  particularly  narrow  —  narrowed 
by  those  views  of  personal  predilection 
which  he  himself  would  suppose  were  di- 
rected by  his  general  ruling  passion  for 
moral  and  religious  principles.  But  even 
if  we  admit  the  justness  of  the  introduc- 
tion of  these  considerations  into  the  sober 
work  of  a  true  historian,  it  remains  pos- 
sible and  even  probable  that  many  false 
steps  will  be  made  in  the  application  of 
these  moral  and  religious  tenets  to  the  re- 
mote facts  of  past  history  (in  themselves 
difficult  to  apprehend  in  truth  and  clear- 
ness); and  it  appears  to  me,  for  instance, 
to  require  a  great  deal  of  imaginative  skill 
to  summarize  much  of  Venetian  history 
and  art  under  definite  moral  heads,  even 
if  the  facts  were  clearer  than  they  really 
are.  I  venture  to  believe  that  in  his  deal- 
ings with  history,  as  well  as  with  art,  he 
has  unconsciously,  owing  to  these  precon- 
ceived unscientific  interests  and  motives, 


clipped  and  arranged  and  forced  facts 
into  a  grouping  for  which  these  facts  had 
not  the  remotest  natural  predisposition 
or  elective  affinity.  This  unhistoric  and 
unscientific  prejudice  of  mind,  one  of 
Bacon's  idols,  manifesting  a  desire  to  see 
facts  in  the  order  in  which  his  personal 
moral  consciousness  would  like  them  to 
have  been,  is  often  patent  and  naively 
manifest ;  as  when,  for  instance,  he  says, 
in  a  passage  on  Venetian  history  in  Stones 
of  Venice :  "  I  sincerely  trust  that  the  in- 
quirer would  be  disappointed  who  should 
endeavor  to  trace  any  more  immediate 
reasons  for  their  adoption  of  the  cause  of 
Alexander  III.  against  Barbarossa  than 
the  piety  which  was  excited  by  the  char- 
acter of  their  suppliant,  and  the  noble 
pride  which  provoked  the  insolence  of 
the  Emperor." 

When  a  historical  age,  or  an  old  mas- 
ter, or  one  of  their  works,  or  one  side 
and  feature  of  the  age,  master,  and 
work,  correspond  to  the  leading  feature 
of  Ruskin's  moral  nature,  then  his  sym- 
pathy grows  deep  and  searching,  and  he 
is  enabled  to  discover  hidden  beauties 


that  were  not  evident  before,  and  to  shed 
a  brilliant  and  glowing  light  over  that 
which  was  wrapped  in  cold  gloom.  In 
other  words,  Ruskin  must  admire  in  order 
to  be  just  in  his  treatment.  His  mind  is 
thus  diametrically  opposed  to  the  ideally 
scientific  mind  summarized  epigrammati- 
cally  by  Spinoza  in  the  words,  neque  flere, 
neque  ridere,  neque  admtrari,  neque  con- 
temnere  —  sed  intelligere  —  "  neither  to 
weep  nor  to  laugh,  neither  to  admire  nor 
to  despise,  but  to  understand."  And  I 
cannot  help  believing  that  Ruskin's  treat- 
ment of  history,  more  especially  of  the 
history  of  art,  as  far  as  it  has  had  in- 
fluence, has  retarded  the  progress  of  the 
really  scientific  investigation  of  the  past, 
which  in  other  countries,  especially  in 
Germany,  has  been  fully  established  and 
developed,  and  has  produced  such  rich 
harvest.  Great  as  has  been  the  share 
which  England  has  had  in  the  establish- 
ment of  scientific  method  in  the  natural 
sciences,  the  historical  sciences,  with  some 
notable  exceptions  of  individual  efforts, 
have  traditionally  been  retarded  in  their 
growth  by  the  intermixture  of  interests, 


55 

literary,  political,  or  ethical,  foreign  to  and 
destructive  of  the  supreme  end,  namely, 
the  acquisition  of  methodical  knowledge. 
With  regard  to  the  study  of  the  history 
of  art,  the  result  has  been  that  those  who 
have  been  inspired  by  Ruskin  have  thus 
spurned  sober  historical  inquiry  and  scien- 
tific observation,  while  the  really  scientific 
inquirers  in  other  departments  of  knowl- 
edge have  not  credited  the  subject  with 
the  capability  of  sober  methodical  treat- 
ment, and  so,  for  instance,  the  introduc- 
tion of  these  studies  into  the  recognized 
homes  of  inquiry — the  universities  —  as 
topics  of  serious  thought  has  been  de- 
layed. 

Though,  as  we  shall  see,  Ruskin  in  the 
main  drift  of  his  treatment  of  nature  is 
not  romantic,  in  his  treatment  of  man 
and  his  works  in  the  present  and  in  the 
past  he  distinctly  is.  I  think  it  impor- 
tant for  the  understanding  of  what  fol- 
lows that  this  term  "  romantic,"  used  so 
loosely  and  frequently,  should  be  more 
clearly  defined. 

The  romantic  spirit  has  ever  arisen  in 
times  when  people  were  discontented  with 


the  then  existing  state  of  affairs.  It  pri- 
marily manifests  itself  in  its  negative  char- 
acter, in  the  spurning  of  what  is  living 
and  present,  and  in  the  attempt  at  blind- 
ing the  eye  to  what  is  actual,  and  in  so 
far  ungainly.  There  is  therefore  always 
a  touch  of  unreality  about  the  romantic. 
This  negative  repulsion  from  the  actual 
and  present  also  gives  essential  color  to 
its  positive  features,  namely,  in  making 
whatever  comes  within  its  pale  essentially 
different  from  what  is  habitually  present 
in  the  living.  The  romanticist  thus  looks 
upon  the  past  because  it  is  past  and  not 
present,  and  upon  the  works  of  fancy  be- 
cause they  are  fanciful  and  not  real ;  but 
both  must  have  the  power  of  carrying 
him  away  from  the  oppressive  reality  to 
that  which  is  different  from  it. 

Another  essential  attribute  of  the  ro- 
mantic spirit  is  the  desiring  attitude  of 
mind.  Though  the  romanticist  looks  for 
the  past  because  it  is  past,  and  upon  the 
fanciful  because  it  is  not  real,  he  does  not 
look  upon  them  dispassionately,  but  long- 
ingly, with  the  futile  desire,  of  which  he 
is  half  conscious,  to  make  them  present 


57 


and  actual.  And  while,  on  the  one  hand, 
disporting  himself  in  Rousseauesque  nu- 
dity, or  wrapping  himself  closely  in  the 
sable  cloak  of  Werther,  he  weakens  the  vi- 
tality of  the  present  and  actual  by  means 
of  his  morbidly  powerful  imagination,  on 
the  other  hand,  his  desires  have  not  di- 
minished the  remoteness  of  the  past  and 
of  the  realms  of  fantasy.  Having  shed 
over  both  the  particular  light  natural  to 
him  personally  in  his  fervent  longings, 
and  having  destroyed  his  clearness  of 
sight  with  regard  to  the  present,  and 
disturbed  its  just  proportion,  he  has  not 
gained  in  the  power  of  penetrating  into 
the  past,  which  he  has  also  robbed  of  its 
true  consistency  in  emasculating  his  en- 
ergy of  dispassionate  retrospection. 

The  romantic  must  not  be  confounded 
with  the  historical.  I  believe  that  it  is 
not  very  long  that  we  have  emerged  out 
of  the  romantic  period,  and  that  one  of 
the  main  intellectual  features  of  the  age 
of  which  ours  is  the  beginning  will  be 
the  historical  habit  of  mind.  It  has  often 
been  said  that  the  age  in  which  we  live  is 
primarily  scientific,  chiefly  marked  by  the 


habit  of  mind  produced  and  encouraged 
by  careful  observation  of  the  living  things 
that  surround  us,  and  by  inductive  rea- 
soning. Though  this  be  true,  it  appears 
to  me  none  the  less  true  that  our  age  is 
intellectually  also  marked  by  the  con- 
sideration of  the  past,  and  is  historical 
as  much  as  it  is  scientific  and  humani- 
tarian. We  also  look  to  the  past,  per- 
haps more  than  any  preceding  age,  yet 
distinctly  not  in  the  romantic  spirit. 
There  is  no  desire  mixed  up  with  this  in- 
terest in  the  past,  no  attempt  at  fleeing 
to  it,  away  from  the  present ;  for  we  have 
made  the  past  ever  present,  a  real  and 
actual  part  of  our  mental  possessions,  in 
which  we  can  take  purely  intellectual  or 
emotionally  sympathetic  delight  as  much 
as  in  the  living  realities  before  us.  More 
and  more  the  feeling  is  spreading  among 
all  people  that  the  knowledge  of  the  past 
is  a  common  heritage,  and  it  is  becoming 
an  essential  part  of  the  consciousness  of 
all  thinking  people,  without  which  no 
mind  will  be  considered  completely  de- 
veloped and  educated.  To  instance  poe- 
try, the  nearest  field  where  romanticism 


59 

has  disported  itself,  it  appears  to  me  that 
Robert  Browning  in  his  treatment  of  the 
past  strongly  marks  the  turning-point  of 
this  new  historical  attitude.  To  him  the 
past  with  its  life  is  a  great  mine,  from 
which  treasures  may  be  brought  to  the 
surface  of  the  present,  adding  to  the  in- 
tellectual and  artistic  wealth  of  our  own 
days  without  diminishing  the  working 
capital  of  our  moral  and  useful  mental 
industry.  And  because  he  thus  breaks 
through  the  gates  of  the  past,  unburdened 
by  the  melancholy  weight  of  morbid  de- 
sires, he  can  really  penetrate  to  the  depths, 
whence  he  returns  with  genuine  jewels, 
and  not  with  theypotsherds  and  bits  of 
glass  and  paste  tfi^t  lie  this  side  the  gate 
in  the  vague  unreality  of  /the  misty  land 
of  romanticism.  The  less  we  are  roman- 
tic, the  less  we  are  thus  fearful  of  or  op- 
posed to^the  present,  the  more  likely  are 
we  to  do  justice  to  history. 

Now  it  appears  to  me  that  Ruskin  is 
still  strongly  enslaved  by  romanticism,  as 
well  in  his  want  of  real  sympathy  with 
the  present,  with  that  which  actually  is, 
as  in  his  incapacity  to  throw  off  his  per- 


sonal  predilections  when  dealing  with 
past  ages  or  with  ancient  works  of  art. 
So,  for  instance,  he  seems  to  me  incapa- 
ble of  appreciating,  and  wilfully  closes  his 
eyes  to,  the  spirit  of  ancient  Hellas.  The 
moral  and  intellectual  life  of  the  Greeks 
does  not  appear  to  him  to  furnish  that 
which  he  personally  desires  to  find,  and 
therefore  he  has  not  been  able  justly  to 
appreciate  their  history  nor  to  feel  their 
art.  And  when,  as  in  the  Queen  of  the 
Air,  he  does  deal  with  one  of  their  re- 
ligious works,  he  transforms,  and  I  must 
say  often  caricatures,  it  into  a  lay-figure 
hung  all  over  with  mystical  tinsel.  The 
healthy  brightness  and  cheerfulness  of 
this  artistic  race  have  not  increased  his 
rich  treasure-house  with  any  of  its  re- 
splendent jewels.  Nay,  it  appears  to  me 
that  it  is  partly  owing  to  this  want  of  his- 
torical sympathy  that,  in  architecture,  his 
powerful  yet  exclusive  praise  of  the  Goth- 
ic should  at  the  same  time  have  driven 
him  to  the  abuse  of  the  Hellenic  elements 
in  Renaissance  building.  The  same  feel- 
ing has  led  him  to  draw  such  arbitrarily 
hard  and  fast  lines  between  what  he  con- 


6i 


siders  periods  of  high  development  and 
periods  of  absolute  decline  in  the  life  and 
arts  of  political  communities,  as  it  has 
also  in  part  been  effective  in  blinding  him 
to  the  great  beauties  in  the  art  of  whole 
nations,  such  as  the  Dutch.  It  has  led 
him,  and  with  him  many  others,  because 
they  see  the  undoubted  beauty  in  child- 
like simplicity  (which  the  others  can  ap- 
preciate as  well  as  the  romanticist),  to 
exaggerate  and  to  hold  up  for  odious 
comparison,  distorting  truthful  relation, 
the  merits  of  the  early  struggling  efforts 
of  incomplete  art — incomplete  not  only 
in  execution,  but  often  (but  for  the  sugges- 
tion of  simplicity  contained  in  the  effort, 
and  not  in  the  work  itself)  even  in  lofti- 
ness of  true  artistic  conception.  And  it 
is  the  romantic  projection  of  his  personal 
religious  prejudice  which  makes  him  con- 
sider imperfection  as  such,  which  un- 
doubtedly prevails  in  all  things  terrestrial, 
an  artistic  virtue,  as  he  does  in  §  25,  chap, 
vi.,  Vol.  II.,  in  Stones  of  Venice.  We 
meet  with  much  misguided  judgment  and 
superficial  cant  nowadays  with  regard  to 
the  qualities  of  more  savage  art,  and  the 


62 


beauty  in  the  imperfections  of  technique, 
and  this  turbid  wave  of  taste  has  had  a 
deleterious  effect  upon  art  production 
and  manufacture.  There  may  be  some 
rude  quality  in  the  early  stages  of  more 
"  savage  art,"  and  we  may  admire  these 
qualities,  but  in  so  far  as  they  are  "sav- 
age" we  must  never  forget  they  are  im- 
perfect. The  early  or  archaic  periods 
of  art  are  full  of  interest  and  a  cer- 
tain kind  of  beauty ;  but  considered  from 
the  highest  artistic  point  of  view  they 
are  certainly  inferior  to  the  most  de- 
veloped forms.  However  capable,  for 
instance,  we  may  be  to  appreciate  the 
qualities  of  the  work  of  an  early  Greek 
sculptor,  such  as  Onatas,  the  highest  spir- 
itual expression  of  this  current  of  human 
effort  is  still  to  be  found  in  the  works  of 
Phidias,  towards  which  the  earlier  endeav- 
ors tend.  This  is  the  case  in  the  works 
of  all  branches  and  periods  of  art.  And 
the  fashion  which  has  existed,  and  is  still 
current,  of  paradoxically  magnifying  the 
merit  of  the  quaint  forms  of  less  perfect 
art,  at  the  cost  of  the  works  belonging  to 
the  advanced  stages,  is  either  due  to  in- 


sincere  cant  or  a  mistake  in  assign  ing  the 
proper  place  and  proportion  to  some  indi- 
vidual virtue  or  cause  of  preference.  Still 
more  common  appears  to  be  the  favor 
which  imperfections  of  technique  find. 
If  certain  pieces  of  Venetian  glass-work 
are  undoubtedly  superior  to  the  machine- 
work  of  the  present  day,  it  is  not  due  to 
the  "  imperfection  "  of  the  work  of  the 
hand,  nor  to  the  obtrusion  of  man's  labor 
in  executing  it,  but  because  the  lines  are 
less  hard,  and  the  work  of  man  really  ap- 
pears to  produce  finer  linear  effects  and 
more  beautiful  refractions  of  light.  But 
to  reproduce  actual  faults  of  structure, 
which  the  benighted  workers  in  past  ages 
would  gladly  have  improved  upon  if  they 
had  had  the  implements  and  known  the 
processes,  to  vitiate  the  healthy  life  of 
architecture  in  new  buildings  by  the  wan- 
ton reproduction  of  pathological  accidents 
of  time  in  ancient  edifices,  constantly  to 
dilute  the  "  architectural  "  by  a  superficial 
infusion  of  the  "  pictorial  " — as  is  so  fre- 
quently done  now — is  a  morbid  state  of 
taste  in  support  of  which  the  misguided 
public  and  artists  can  find  many  a  passage 


64 


in  the  writings  of  Ruskin.  In  dealing 
with  the  history  of  art,  with  the  works  of 
nations  and  periods  and  individuals,  the 
golden  rule  for  the  general  treatment  of 
Ruskin's  works  applies  more  powerfully 
than  ever — follow  him  when  he  admires, 
and  fly  from  him  when  he  disapproves. 


II 

RUSKIN  AS  THE  FOUNDER  OF  *PH^NOM- 
ENOLOGY  OF  NATURE 

THE  term  romantic  is  also  applied  to 
nature,  and  here  it  has  fundamentally  the 
same  meaning  as  when  applied  to  history. 
The  romantic  attitude  of  mind  with  re- 
gard to  nature  is  again  distinguished  by 
the*  shunning  of  the  reality  that  imme- 
diately surrounds  man  ;  and  though  in 
the  case  of  nature  it  is  not  possible,  as  it 

*  I  have  had  much  hesitation  in  choosing  this  term, 
which,  no  doubt,  has  a  pedantic  sound.  The  first  word 
which  suggested  itself  was  "  Morphology,"  which  would 
have  accentuated  the  study  of  form  as  such.  But  this 
term  has  been  seized  by  modern  biologists,  and  would 
thus  have  been  ambiguous.  The  word  <-  Phsenomenol- 
ogy,"  I  am  aware,  was  in  use  by  mediaeval  schoolmen. 
But  the  remoteness  and  obscurity  of  scholastic  writings 
made  me  hesitate  less  to  adopt  it  in  the  new  and  modern 
acceptation  I  have  ventured  to  give  it,  especially  as  the 
scholastic  antithesis  between  Phenomena  and  Noou- 
mena  helps  to  mark  the  essential  meaning  of  the  term 
Phsenomenology  as  here  used. 
5 


66 


is  in  the  case  of  history  and  of  the  world 
of  imagination,  to  modify  or  distort  what 
bears  its  testimony  in  itself  and  is  present 
to  the  senses,  still  this  negative  tendency 
of  romanticism  manifests  itself  in  the  se- 
lection which  is  made  among  the  scenes 
of  nature.  And  this  romantic  scenery  is 
selected  because  it  has  something  out  of 
the  common,  something  that  differs  from 
the  actual  surroundings  of  man  in  his 
daily  life,  and  in  so  far  leads  him  away 
from  the  reality  which  he  dislikes  or  fails 
to  appreciate.  The  gentle  rolling  pasture, 
the  stretches  beyond  the  trim  flower-gar- 
den, reverberating  with  the  busy  life  of 
the  village  close  at  hand,  are  not  roman- 
tic, excepting,  perhaps,  by  relative  grada- 
tion, to  the  dweller  in  the  metropolis ; 
they  are  too  familiar  and  actually  living. 
But  the  distant  lonely  crag  and  ravine, 
with  the  uncommonness  of  their  jagged 
outline,  set  in  a  scene  of  desolation,  with- 
out any  suggestion  of  present  human  life, 
are,  apart  from  the  quality  of  sublimity 
which  they  may  possess,  and  the  undoubt- 
ed specific  charm  of  novelty  which  unfamil- 
iarity  adds  to  their  intrinsic  form,  more 


likely  to  be  considered  romantic.  This  is 
because  of  their  antithesis  to  the  scenes 
that  are  associated  with  familiar  life,  and 
their  admixture  of  unreality,  owing  to  their 
unfamiliarity,  and  the  absence  of  associa- 
tions which  tie  the  imagination  of  the 
present-weary  romanticist  in  his  flight 
away  from  what  is  before  him. 

There  is,  furthermore,  the  element  of  de- 
sire in  the  attitude  of  mind  when  the  ro- 
manticist endeavors  to  appreciate  nature. 
It  here  manifests  itself  in  that  he  must 
needs  project  himself — that  is,  man— into 
the  nature  that  he  thus  admires.  As  he 
did  not  give  an  unprejudiced  ear  to  the 
voice  of  the  past,  so  he  does  not  permit 
nature  to  give  the  fulness  of  her  story  in 
her  own  language.  There  is  a  predomi- 
nance of  human  associations,  be  it  with 
regard  to  man's  fate  in  the  present  or  in 
the  past,  in  this  view  of  nature  ;  and  the 
romanticist  is  not  able  to  receive  com- 
pletely and  unalloyed  all  the  impressions 
of  form  and  color  and  concentrated  life 
which  give  a  distinct  spiritual  organiza- 
tion to  natural  scenery  undisturbed  by 
alien  considerations. 


68 


Both  these  elements  in  the  romanticist's 
selection  of  natural  scenery  have  added  to 
them  the  further  factor  that  he  admixes 
with  his  appreciation  of  nature  those  asso- 
ciations from  the  sphere  of  human  inter- 
est that  we  have  before  defined  as  roman- 
tic; that  he  prefers  those  scenes  and  effects 
of  nature  which,  in  so  far  as  they  do  sug- 
gest human  associations,  recall  those  that 
are  not  of  the  present,  but  belong  to  the 
desired  and  preferred  section  of  the  past. 
Then  it  is  not  the  rock  jutting  over  the 
sea  that  is  admired  in  itself,  but  this  only 
claims  his  attention  as  a  firm  foundation 
for  the  ruined  castle  in  which  proud  and 
chivalrous  knights  and  fair  ladies  dwelt ; 
not  the  field,  with  its  waving  ears  of  corn 
and  its  hedge-rows  with  all  the  delicate 
colors  and  the  world  of  graceful  lines  of 
the  growth  within  it,  belted  by  wood  and 
dale,  but  the  field  upon  which  Round- 
heads and  Cavaliers  fought  for  the  Parlia- 
ment or  King  Charles  ;  spring-tide  is  not 
dressed  in  its  potent  and  rich  transforma- 
tion for  its  own  inner  beauty,  but  it  is  the 
season  of  love ;  autumn  is  at  most  likened 
to  man's  incipient  decay ;  clouds  only  har- 


69 

bor  under  their  swelling  robes  the  shafts 
of  lightning  that  bode  destruction  ;  and 
the  atmosphere  is  bright,  is  clear  or  dis- 
mal, as  it  best  suits  the  lonely  horseman 
muffled  in  his  cloak. 

But  in  Ruskin  we  have  indeed  a  reve- 
lation of  nature  in  a  new  light ;  and  this 
attitude  of  mind  is  distinctly  modern,  and 
in  its  main  development  has  been  chiefly 
English.  Perhaps,  as  running  parallel 
with  Wordsworth,  the  American  poets 
Bryant,  Longfellow,  Whittier,  Emerson, 
Lowell,  and,  above  all,  Thoreau  and  Bur- 
roughs, with  their  intercourse  with  nature, 
and  their  love  for  and  intimacy  with  the 
wealth  of  beautiful  trees  in  which  the 
New  England  and  Middle  States  abound, 
may  be  quoted.  But  they,  as  well  as 
Keats,  Southey,  and  Tennyson,  do  not 
form  the  distinct  landmarks  which  the 
four  names  here  following  indicate.  The 
Greeks,  though  they  were  in  nowise  ro- 
mantic— in  fact  were  distinctly  opposed  to 
that  frame  of  mind — were  so  thoroughly 
and  pronouncedly  human  in  their  whole 
mental  organization  that  they  did  not  de- 
velop this  form  of  appreciation.  They 


constantly  projected  man — though  actual, 
present  man — into  nature,  and  endowed 
her  with  life  like  their  own,  so  vivid  that 
they  could  always  hold  friendly  commun- 
ion with  her.  Further,  she  harbored  the 
life  of  their  gods,  and  their  gods  were 
thus  familiarly  present  to  them.  But  to 
study  and  admire  her  for  her  own  inner 
beauty  of  form  and  color,  as  they  studied 
and  admired  the  human  form  for  its  own 
pure  sake,  was  a  stage  of  .aesthetic  develop- 
ment to  which  they  did  not  attain.  And  in 
the  whole  range  of  literature,  down  to  our 
own  days,  so  far  as  I  am  acquainted  with 
it  and  as  I  have  been  able  to  recall  its 
treatment  of  nature,  there  is  no  manifes- 
tation of  the  habitual  and  sustained  effort 
of  describing  and  dealing  with  nature  for 
her  own  sake,  independent  of  human  as- 
sociations. Spring  and  summer,  valleys 
and  mountains,  meadows  and  flowers,  rain 
and  sunshine,  are  indeed  dealt  with ;  but 
in  the  dealing  with  them  there  is  no  mani- 
festation of  real  observation  of  their  form, 
nor  is  there  a  pure  and  concentrated  inter- 
est in  them  for  their  own  sake.  If  they 
are  not  themselves  anthropomorphic,  his- 


torical,  or  romantic,  they  are  at  most  bu- 
colic or  idyllic  in  their  treatment. 

The  beginnings  of  this  new  epoch  are 
quite  recent,  and  they  are,  as  I  believe,  to 
be  found  in  a  writer  who  in  his  main  feat- 
ures is  considered  the  arch  -  romanticist, 
namely,  Byron,  in  one  of  his  works, 
"  Childe  Harold."  Of  course  in  this  poem 
we  have  much  description  of  scenery 
which  would  be  classed  under  the  head 
of  romantic,  and  I  only  mean  that  in  him 
we  have  the  beginnings  of  a  designed  and 
concentrated  desire  of  dwelling  upon  the 
scenes,  making  their  own  inner  harmony 
the  chief  point  of  artistic  interest.  The 
next  stage  in  this  development  I  find  in 
Shelley ;  and  though  in  him  the  warmth 
of  his  humanitarian  interest,  which  gives 
its  stamp  to  his  lyrical  genius,  always 
makes  its  strength  felt,  especially  in  the 
human  imagery  he  uses  in  describing  nat- 
ure, still  we  feel  the  genuine  touch  of  the 
true  sympathetic  observer,  whether  it  be 
in  the  awful  stillness  of  the  mountain 
heights,  or  in  the  rush  of  the  west  wind 
driving  the  withered  leaves,  or  even  in  the 
fantastic  description  of  Alastor's  mount- 


ain  chasm.  And  the  next  marked  step  is 
made  by  Wordsworth,  who  trains  the  eye 
to  watch  and  perceive  even  the  petals  of 
simple  little  flowers ;  though  in  him,  again, 
there  is  a  preponderance  of  the  didactic 
habit.  But  the  highest  stage  yet  reached 
in  this  direction,  a  new  departure,  in  fact, 
in  the  character  of  man's  observation,  is 
made  by  Ruskin.  These  four  men  appear 
to  me  to  mark  the  advance.  The  claims 
of  many  have  been  considered,  and  have 
been  rejected  as  either  not  falling  under 
this  head  at  all,  or  not  marking  distinct 
steps  in  this  progression.  I  have  careful- 
ly considered,  for  instance,  the  claims  of 
Scott ;  but  I  have  felt  that  his  descriptions 
are  either  romantic,  or,  at  least,  that  they 
are  always  marked  by  a  subordination  to 
some  main  human  interest  or  event  in 
the  poem  or  story.  And  it  is  especially 
curious  to  note  that  there  is  great  diffi- 
culty in  including  among  their  number  any 
of  the  German,  French,  or  Italian  poets. 
And  though  Goethe  is  less  romantic  in 
his  description  than  Schiller  or  Uhland, 
his  descriptive  lyrics  are  more  directly 
expressions  of  moods  evoked  by,  or  cast- 


ing  their  light  over,  the  objects  described  ; 
while  Lamartine  and  Victor  Hugo  strike 
me  as  romantic,  idyllic,  or  didactic.  The 
chief  developers  of  this  habit  of  mind  are 
thus  all  English ;  and  when  the  important 
position  which  England  has  held  in  the 
development  of  the  art  of  landscape- 
painting  in  its  highest  form  is  taken  into 
account,  I  may  venture  to  give  my  indi- 
vidual experience  in  a  case  where  it  is 
difficult  to  collect  data  to  a  degree  suffi- 
cient to  warrant  the  formulating  of  a 
generalization  with  any  pretense  to  scien- 
tific weight  of  evidence.  Having  directed 
my  attention  to  the  question,  I  have  found 
in  my  travels  that,  whereas  the  non-Eng- 
lish travellers  I  met  would  only  comment 
upon  more  striking  and  uncommon  scenes, 
and  would  generally  be  seeking  for  and 
dwelling  upon  historical  associations  or 
features  of  human  or  poetical  or  scien- 
tific interest,  the  English  travellers  corre- 
sponding to  them  would  manifest  a  more 
penetrating  interest  in  all  classes  of  sce- 
nery, and  a  more  habitual  power  of  ob- 
serving, and  thus  of  appreciating,  forms 
themselves.  They  seem  to  have  in  their 


memory  a  store  of  lines  and  colors  and 
trees  and  plants  and  cloud  forms  and  days 
of  various  qualities  of  light  which  enable 
them  to  differentiate  more  intelligently 
what  is  before  their  eyes.  This  may  be 
due  to  the  fact  that  the  more  educated 
classes  of  Englishmen  have  in  great  num- 
bers been  bred  and  have  lived  in  the  coun- 
try, where  the  occupation  in  the  garden 
and  especially  the  familiar  frequent  ac- 
complishment of  water -color  drawing, 
where  the  walks  of  the  women  and  the 
field-sports  of  the  men,  have  encouraged 
such  observation.  Furthermore,  the  fact 
that  the  English  are  a  travelling  nation 
must  have  contributed  to  this  power;  and 
finally,  perhaps,  also  the  importance  which 
atmospheric  changes  have  in  a  country 
where  they  are  as  frequent  as  they  are  ex- 
pected, and  are  of  importance  to  the  lei- 
sure occupations  of  the  dwellers  in  the 
country,  may  have  directed  their  atten- 
tion to  these  facts,  and  led  to  the  forma- 
tion of  a  habit  and  to  the  growth  of  a 
faculty  which  could  be  utilized  in  a  pure- 
ly artistic  spirit  without  any  further  inter- 
est of  personal  comfort  or  use. 


75 


As  the  true  landscape-painter  has  given 
us  pleasure  in  the  new  harmonious  soul 
he  has  infused  into  the  nature  he  pre- 
sents by  his  truthfully  executed  compo- 
sition, and  has  added  a  new  genus  of  pic- 
torial art  to  sacred,  mythical,  historical, 
genre,  and  portrait  painting,  so  Ruskin 
has  insisted  upon  and  developed  a  new 
form  and  habit  of  observation  of  nature 
which  can  make  of  us  landscape-painters 
for  the  nonce,  gaining  all  the  delight 
which  is  inherent  in  great  pictures  them- 
selves, without  any  of  the  painful  effort 
necessary  for  the  execution  of  these  works 
by  the  brush  or  the  pencil.  He  has  thereby 
increased  our  capital  of  ennobling  pleas- 
ures, opening  out  to  us  fields  of  delight 
in  the  things  that  are  before  us,  without 
diminishing  their  inherent  virtue  or  util- 
ity, and  without  thereby  infringing  upon 
the  possible  good  which  our  neighbors 
may  derive  from  them.  I  feel  confident 
that  whoever  has  read  the  works  of  Rus- 
kin will  thereafter  approach  nature  with  a 
new  faculty  of  appreciation,  will  have  his 
attention  directed  to  what  he  before  passed 
by  with  indifference,  and  \vill  discover 


what  before  was  hidden;  and  that  even 
those  who  possessed  this  habit  of  mind 
before  will  have  it  intensified  and  enlarged 
by  the  guidance  which  he  will  have  given 
them.  And  this  will  not  be  only  with  re- 
gard to  the  beauties  of  the  Alps  or  the 
stormy  sea,  but  they  will  be  able  to  ex- 
tract elevating  pleasure  out  of  each  flower 
that  blooms  before  their  window  in  the 
summer,  and  even  out  of  the  graceful 
tracery-work  of  the  bare  branches  of  the 
tree,  deadened  by  the  cold  winter,  that 
stands  in  dreary  loneliness  at  the  back  of 
their  town  house  or  in  the  city  square. 
And  whether  it  be  bright  or  misty,  wheth- 
er it  mean  sunshine  or  rain,  each  cloud 
will  become  to  them  a  fountain  of  unself- 
ish joy,  having  before  merely  been  the 
source  of  anxiety  or  anticipation. 

"  It  is  a  strange  thing,"  he  says,  "how  little 
in  general  people  know  about  the  sky  ;  it  is  the 
part  of  creation  in  which  nature  has  done  more 
for  the  sake  of  pleasing  man,  more  for  the  sole 
and  evident  purpose  of  talking  to  him  and 
teaching  him,  than  any  other  of  her  works,  and 
it  is  just  the  part  in  which  we  least  attend  to 
her.  There  are  not  many  of  her  other  works 


in  which  some  more  material  or  essential  pur- 
pose than  the  mere  pleasing  of  man  is  not  an- 
swered by  every  part  of  their  organization  ;  but 
every  essential  purpose  of  the  sky  might,  so  far 
as  we  know,  be  answered,  if  once  in  three  days 
or  thereabouts  a  great,  ugly,  black,  round  cloud 
were  brought  up  over  the  blue,  and  everything 
well  watered,  and  was  left  blue  again  till  next 
time,  with  perhaps  a  film  of  morning  and  even- 
ing mist  for  dew.  And  instead  of  this  there  is 
not  a  moment  of  any  day  of  our  lives  when 
nature  is  not  producing  scene  after  scene,  pict- 
ure after  picture,  glory  after  glory,  and  work- 
ing still  upon  such  exquisite  and  constant  prin- 
ciples of  the  most  perfect  beauty  that  it  is  quite 
certain  it  is  all  done  for  us  and  intended  for 
our  perpetual  pleasure.  And  every  man,  wher- 
ever placed,  however  far  from  the  other  sources 
of  interest  or  beauty,  has  this  doing  for  him 
constantly.  The  noblest  scenes  of  the  earth 
can  be  seen  and  known  but  by  few;  it  is  not 
intended  that  man  should  live  always  in  the 
midst  of  them,  he  injures  them  by  his  presence; 
he  ceases  to  feel  them  if  he  be  always  with 
them  ;  but  the  sky  is  for  all  ;  bright  as  it  is,  it 
is  not  *  too  bright,  nor  good,  for  human  nat- 
ure's daily  food  ;'  it  is  fitted  in  all  its  functions 
for  the  perpetual  comfort  and  exalting  of  the 
heart,  for  the  soothing  it  and  purifying  it  from 


73 


its  dross  and  dust.  Sometimes  gentle,  some- 
times capricious,  sometimes  awful,  never  the 
same  for  two  moments  together  ;  almost  human 
in  its  passions,  almost  spiritual  in  its  tender- 
ness, almost  divine  in  its  infinity,  its  appeal  to 
what  is  immortal  in  us  is  as  distinct  as  its  min- 
istry of  chastisement  or  of  blessing  to  what  is 
mortal  or  essential.  And  yet  we  never  attend 
to  it,  we  never  make  it  a  subject  of  thought, 
but  as  it  has  to  do  with  our  animal  sensations  ; 
we  look  upon  all  by  which  it  speaks  to  us  more 
clearly  than  to  brutes,  upon  all  which  bears  wit- 
ness to  the  intention  of  the  Supreme,  that  we 
are  to  receive  more  from  the  covering  vault 
than  the  light  and  the  dew  which  we  share 
with  the  weed  and  the  worm,  only  as  a  succes- 
sion of  meaningless  and  monotonous  accidents, 
too  common  and  too  vain  to  be  worthy  of  a 
moment  of  watchfulness  or  a  glance  of  admira- 
tion If  in  our  moments  of  utter  idleness  or 
insipidity  we  turn  to  the  sky  as  a  last  resource, 
which  of  its  phenomena  do  we  speak  of  ?  One 
says  it  has  been  wet,  and  another  it  has  been 
windy,  and  another  it  has  been  warm.  Who 
among  the  whole  chattering  crowd  can  tell  one 
of  the  forms  and  precipices  of  the  chain  of  tall 
white  mountains  that  girded  the  horizon  at 
noon  yesterday?  Who  saw  the  narrow  sun- 
beam that  came  out  of  the  south  and  smote 


upon  their  summits  until  they  melted  and 
mouldered  away  in  a  dust  of  blue  rain  ?  Who 
saw  the  dance  of  the  dead  clouds  when  the  sun- 
light left  them  last  night,  and  the  west  wind 
blew  them  before  it  like  withered  leaves  ?  All 
has  passed  unregretted  as  unseen  ;  or  if  the 
apathy  be  ever  shaken  off,  even  for  an  instant, 
it  is  only  by  what  is  gross  or  what  is  extraordi- 
nary ;  and  yet  it  is  not  in  the  broad  and  fierce 
manifestations  of  the  elemental  energies,  not  in 
the  clash  of  the  hail  nor  the  drift  of  the  whirl- 
wind, that  the  highest  characters  of  the  sub- 
lime are  developed.  God  is  not  in  the  earth- 
quake nor  in  the  fire,  but  in  the  still  small 
voice.  They  are  but  the  blunt  and  the  low 
faculties  of  our  nature  which  can  only  be  ad- 
dressed through  lampblack  and  lightning.  It 
is  in  quiet  and  subdued  passages  of  unobtrusive 
majesty,  the  dry  and  the  calm,  and  the  perpet- 
ual— that  which  must  be  sought  ere  it  is  seen, 
and  loved  ere  it  is  understood — things  which 
the  angels  work  out  for  us  daily  and  yet  very 
eternally,  which  are  never  wanting  and  never 
repeated,  which  are  to  be  found  always,  yet 
each  found  but  once  ;  it  is  through  these  that 
the  lesson  is  chiefly  taught,  and  the  blessing  of 
beauty  given.  These  are  what  the  artist  of 
highest  aim  must  study  ;  it  is  these  by  the  com- 
bination of  which  his  ideal  is  to  be  created  ; 


8o 


these,  of  which  so  little  notice  is  ordinarily 
taken  by  common  observers  that  I  fully  be- 
lieve, little  as  people  in  general  are  concerned 
with  art,  more  of  their  ideas  of  sky  are  derived 
from  pictures  than  from  reality,  and  that  if  we 
could  examine  the  conception  formed  in  the 
minds  of  most  educated  persons  when  we  talk 
of  clouds,  it  would  frequently  be  found  com- 
posed of  fragments  of  blue  and  white  reminis- 
cences of  the  old  masters." — ^Modern  Painters, 
vol.  i.,  sec.  iii.,  chap.  i. 

Thus  it  is,  despite  the  didactic  strain  in- 
troduced here  and  elsewhere,  that  Ruskin 
can  make  non-painting  painters  of  every 
man  and  woman.  In  our  leisure  walks, 
as  well  as  in  proceeding  from  one  task  to 
another  through  fields,  and,  for  that,  even 
through  streets  (and  he  and  others  with 
him  would  devoutly  wish  that  the  hand 
of  man  would  give  more  opportunity  for 
this  pleasure  in  the  streets  of  towns),  we 
can  create  for  ourselves  these  pictures 
within  our  own  minds.  It  is  true,  its  direct 
purpose  is  merely  to  give  him  personal 
pleasure.  Although,  beyond  this,  he  may 
transmit  this  habit  to  those  about  him, 
and  be  a  unit  of  what  may  be  formed  into 


a  national  characteristic;  still  it  does 
not  diminish  the  pleasure-giving  capac- 
ity or  use  of  what  has  thus  caused  him 
delight,  nor  does  he  thereby  interfere 
with  the  pleasure  and  activity  of  his 
neighbor. 

All  this  concerns  the  purely  artistic 
attitude  of  mind  with  regard  to  nature. 
But  original  and  fundamental  as  may 
have  been  Ruskin's  work  in  this  direc- 
tion, it  is  still  more  so  in  the  further  out- 
come of  this  line  of  thought,  in  which,  it 
appears  to  me,  he  has  made  the  beginning 
for  a  quite  new  sphere  of  mental  disci- 
pline— a  sphere  that  lies,  as  I  have  before 
said,  on  the  border  line  between  art  and 
science,  overlapping  into  both.  For  want 
of  a  better  term,  I  should  call  this  Phae- 
nomenology  of  Nature.  The  main  drift 
and  character  of  this  species  of  observa- 
tion is  perhaps  artistic ;  yet  it  is  also 
markedly  cognitive  and  wittingly  system- 
atic, and  thus  within  the  range  of  sci- 
ence. It  differs  from  science  not  only  in 
that  it  has  the  essential  attribute  of  pro- 
ducing aesthetic  pleasure,  but  especially  in 
that  it  is  concerned,  above  all  things,  with 

6 


the  actual  appearance  and  form  of  what 
presents  itself  to  man's  perceptive  faculties 
as  he  uses  them  in  ordinary  life.  He  then 
perceives,  unaided  by  the  mechanical  de- 
vices which  are  to  strengthen  his  senses 
beyond  their  ordinary  capacity,  such  as  the 
microscope  and  telescope  (and,  for  that, 
even  instantaneous  photography),  and  in 
not  making  his  perception  ancillary  and 
subservient  to  the  primarily  scientific  aims 
of  discovering  laws  and  controlling  cau- 
sality. It  is  thus  not  Nooumenology,  but 
Phsenomenology ,  and  if  it  should  ad- 
vance to  the  establishment  and  recog- 
nition of "  laws,"  these  laws,  or  rather  the 
generalization  from  individual  experi- 
ences and  the  recognition  of  constancy 
within  multiplicity  and  variety,  will  al- 
ways be  essentially  concerned  with  the 
form  and  appearance  as  such,  and  not  in 
any  way  primarily  with  the  process  of  or- 
igin, growth,  and  development.  Ruskin, 
as  far  as  his  work  in  this  sphere  is  con- 
cerned, would  consider  the  nature  of  the 
configuration  of  the  earth's  surface,  the  re- 
lation between  the  valley  and  the  mount- 
ain and  the  plain  and  the  shore,  endeavor- 


ing  to  discover  what  is  constant  within  its 
manifoldness,  considering  only  its  form 
and  appearance  as  such,  not  as  the  geolo- 
gist, whose  chief  attention  must  be  di- 
rected towards  the  apprehension  of  the 
causes  which  underlie  changes.  And 
wherever  Ruskin  has  unwittingly  desert- 
ed this  chief  vocation,  to  which  his  genius 
has  called  him  for  the  world's  good,  and 
has  confused  the  clearness  of  his  original 
attitude  of  mind  by  the  feeble  intrusion 
of  that  of  the  geologist  and  the  man  of 
science  in  general,  he  has  tarnished  the 
pure  metal  of  his  work,  has  desecrated  the 
shrine  of  true  science,  and  has  created  an 
artificial  antithesis  between  his  own  view 
of  things  and  that  of  the  professed  and 
conscientious  scientist,  which  has  lowered 
the  sphere  of  each  in  the  eyes  of  the  fol- 
lowers of  either.  So  also  Ruskin  can  ex- 
amine the  form  and  color  of  rocks  and 
stones,  and  can  dwell  upon  their  con- 
stancy, without  in  the  least  being  a  min- 
eralogist, nor  deserving  censure  when 
judged  as  such,  in  spite  of  what  he  has 
done  to  deserve  it ;  and  so  with  regard  to 
plants,  animals,  and  man,  without  being  a 


scientific  botanist  or  biologist  or  an  an- 
thropologist. 

And  as  regards  the  sky,  he  turns  his 
and  our  observation  to  its  phenomena, 
not  as  the  physicist  nor  as  the  meteor- 
ologist would  do,  not  to  prognosticate 
fine  or  fair  weather,  or  to  record  the 
causes  of  its  changes,  nor  to  rob  the  uni- 
verse of  the  secret  of  its  unseen  funda- 
mental laws  of  motion,  not  to  deal  with 
atoms  and  molecules ;  but  to  discover,  if 
such  there  be,  the  laws  of  harmony  and 
of  continuousness  in  the  changes  of  its 
form  as  such,  and  carefully  to  use  in  all 
this,  if  it  be  fitting  to  do  so,  the  knowl- 
edge which  science  gives  from  its  own 
deeply  moral  point  of  view. 

I  am  not  justified,  from  lack  of  sufficient 
observation  on  my  own  part,  to  estimate 
critically  the  exact  degree  in  which  in 
every  instance  Ruskin's  observations  in 
this  respect  are  thorough  and  careful; 
and  from  the  general  tenor  of  much  of 
his  reasoning  in  other  spheres,  I  cannot 
help  fearing  that  he  may  at  times  have 
been  carried  away  in  his  recording  of 
general  phenomena,  for  the  perception  of 


which  he  undoubtedly  has  such  excep- 
tionally favorable  predisposition.  But 
be  this  as  it  may,  so  much  is  clear  to  me, 
that  he  has  pointed  out  to  the  observer 
a  fertile  field  of  inquiry  of  a  new  order 
and  a  new  department  of  knowledge ;  and 
there  is  no  reason  why,  in  the  future, 
those  whose  pursuits  lie  absolutely  in  the 
spheres  of  science,  yet  who  thus  have  ex- 
ceptional material  opportunities  for  obser- 
vation, such  as  geologists,  biologists,  and 
still  more  the  workers  of  our  meteoro- 
logical stations,  should  not  take  up  and 
follow  out  this  class  of  observation  in  the 
main  spirit  of  Ruskin.  Take,  for  instance, 
his  division  of  the  clouds  into  their  three 
regions  of  the  sky,  the  upper  region  of 
the  cirrus,  the  central  region  of  the  stratus, 
the  lower  region  of  the  rain  cloud,  and 
his  classification  of  their  distinctive  forms 
and  colors,  and  their  movement  and 
change,  as  he  beautifully  describes  them 
in  section  iii.  of  the  first  volume  of  Modern 
Painters,  which  will  fully  exemplify  what 
I  here  mean.  His  work  in  this  depart- 
ment alone  will  secure  for  him  a  position 
in  the  company  of  the  world's  great  ben- 


86 


efactors  which  will  have  vitality  to  out- 
live and  outlast  all  the  shortcomings 
which  block  his  way  to  the  gates  of  unre- 
served approbation  and  acceptance ;  and 
the  sooner  we  can  dissipate  the  dross  of 
his  failings  from  the  gold  of  his  virtues, 
the  sooner  will  the  world  realize  its  own 
gain.  And  it  is  thus  even  in  this  sphere 
of  his  greatest  work  that  I  must  again 
point  to  a  limitation,  again  consisting  in 
the  inopportune  introduction  of  his  re- 
ligious and  didactic  bias,  which  darkens 
the  lucidity  of  his  observation,  and  often 
counteracts  the  good  effects  his  teaching 
would  otherwise  have.  I  have  before 
pointed  to  the  good  which  every  reader 
of  Ruskin  must  derive  from  his  works,  in 
having  his  eyes  turned  towards  a  fuller 
appreciation  of  nature.  But  I  cannot 
help  feeling  the  danger  which  his  rapid 
and  lawless  incursions  into  the  province 
of  science  may  have  in  encouraging  that 
great  vice  of  the  general  public,  namely, 
dilettanteism  in  the  study  of  the  Phaenom- 
enology  of  Nature.  I  cannot  help  feeling 
also  that  much  good  as  may  be  done  to 
children  in  producing  in  them  the  love 


and  faculty  of  observation,  and  in  reading 
to  them  selected  passages  from  his  works 
(among  which  I  should  carefully  avoid 
all  those  that  have  the  morbidly  didactic 
tone  in  his  books  for  children  and  girls), 
one  must  guard  against  the  danger  of 
blunting  their  faculty  for  and  reverence 
of  accurate  truthfulness,  in  mixing  up 
fancy  with  systematic  truth,  as  is  done, 
for  instance,  with  regard  to  flowers  in  his 
Proserpina.  An  undisguised  fairy  tale 
on  the  one  hand,  and  a  botanical  primer, 
or,  still  better,  an  intelligent  and  sympa- 
thetic companion  in  the  garclen  and  in 
country  walks,  on  the  other,  would  avoid 
the  danger  I  apprehend.  But  with  these 
reservations,  which  I  have  thought  it 
right  to  make,  this  portion  of  his  work 
remains  of  the  greatest  value,  and  its  value 
is  increased  by  the  opportunities  it  has 
afforded  him  for  the  production  of  those 
works  of  literary  power  seen  at  its  fullest 
height  in  his  treatment  of  nature  as  a 
writer  and  prose  poet. 


Ill 

RUSKIN  AS  A  WRITER  AND    PROSE   POET 

IT  may  be  felt  by  superficial  readers  of 
his  works  that  his  power  of  diction  and 
unsurpassed  command  over  words  and 
their  musical  quality  has  been  used  at 
the  expense  of  his  power  of  describing 
with  accuracy.  Yet  it  is  one  of  the  most 
astonishing  and  admirable  qualities  of 
his  best  passages  that,  with  all  their  al- 
literation and  the  harmony  of  sound 
which  pervades  his  ordered  array,  the  de- 
scription is  most  minute  and  accurate ; 
and  no  better  words,  no  words  encircling 
and  penetrating  the  meaning  of  things 
more  fully  and  promptly,  could  have  been 
chosen.  We  are  inclined  to  approach 
such  passages  with  the  primary  doubt 
that  they  are  too  good  to  be  true,  that 
they  are  too  fine  in  form,  too  much 
adorned  and  bedecked,  to  serve  the  hard 


every -day  use  of  adequate  transmission 
of  meaning.  Yet  if  we  compare  any  one 
thing  we  know  familiarly  with  Ruskin's 
description  of  it,  if  we  attempt  before- 
hand to  transcribe  it  into  sober  accurate 
words,  devoid  of  form  and  rhythm,  and 
then  compare  our  own  description  with 
that  of  Ruskin,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
their  respective  adequacy  of  transmission 
of  meaning,  we  shall  find  that  Ruskin's 
description,  in  addition  to  the  beauty  of 
form,  contains  also  a  more  exhaustive 
enumeration  of  attributes,  and  a  better 
selection  of  the  features  that  give  dis- 
tinctive essence  to  the  thing  described. 
In  the  range  of  all  his  writings  I  can 
hardly  think  of  a  more  illustrative  pas- 
sage than  one,  published  quite  recently 
in  his  Prceterita,  describing  the  Rhone  : 

"  For  all  other  rivers  there  is  a  surface,  and 
an  underneath,  and  a  vaguely  displeasing  idea 
of  the  bottom.  But  the  Rhone  flo\vs  like  one 
lambent  jewel  ;  its  surface  is  nowhere,  its  ethe- 
real self  is  everywhere,  the  iridescent  rush  and 
translucent  strength  of  it,  blue  to  the  shore  and 
radiant  to  the  depth. 

' '  Fifteen  feet  thick,  of  not  flowing  but  fly- 


ing  water  ;  not  water,  neither — melted  glacier, 
rather,  one  should  call  it.  The  force  of  the  ice 
is  with  it,  and  the  wreathing  of  the  clouds,  the 
gladness  of  the  sky,  and  the  continuance  of 
Time. 

"Waves  of  clear  sea  are,  indeed,  lovely  to 
watch,  but  they  are  always  coming  or  gone, 
never  in  a  taken  shape  to  be  seen  for  a  second. 
But  here  was  one  hiighty  wave  that  was  always' 
itself,  and  every  fluted  swirl  of5  it  constant  as 
the  wreathing  of  a  shell.  No  wasting  away  of 
the  fallen  foam,  no  pause  for  gathering  of  pow- 
er, no  hopeless  ebb  of  discouraged  recoil  ;  but 
alike  through  bright  day  and  lulling  night,  the 
never-pausing  plunge,  and  never-fading  flash, 
and  never-hushing  whisper,  and  while  the  sun 
was  up,  the  ever-answering  glow  of  unearthly 
aquamarine,  ultramarine,  violet  blue,  gentian 
blue,  peacock  blue,  river-of-paradise  blue,  glass 
of  a  painted  window  melted  in  the  sun,  and  the 
witch  of  the  Alps  flinging  the  spun  tresses  of  it 
forever  from  her  snow. 

' '  The  innocent  way,  too,  in  which  the  river 
used  to  stop  to  look  into  every  little  corner. 
Great  torrents  always  seem  angry,  and  great 
rivers  too  often  sullen  ;  but  there  is  no  anger, 
no  disdain,  in  the  Rhone.  It  seemed  as  if  the 
mountain  stream  was  in  mere  bliss  at  recover- 
ing itself  again  out  of  the  lake  sleep,  and  raced 


because  it  rejoiced  in  racing,  fain  yet  to  return 
and  stay.  There  were  pieces  of  wave  that 
danced  all  day  as  if  Perdita  were  looking  on  to 
learn  ;  there  were  little  streams  that  skipped 
like  lambs  and  leaped  like  chamois  ;  there  were 
pools  that  shook  the  sunshine  all  through  them, 
and  were  rippled  in  layers  of  overlaid  ripples, 
like  crystal  sand;  there  were  currents  that 
twisted  the  light  into  golden  braids,  and  inlaid 
the  threads  with  turquoise  enamel ;  there  were 
strips  of  stream  that  had  certainly  above  the 
lake  been  mill-streams,  and  were  looking  busi- 
ly for  mills  to  turn  again  ;  there  were  shoots 
of  stream  that  had  once  shot  fearfully  into  the 
air,  and  now  sprang  up  again  laughing  that 
they  had  only  fallen  a  foot  or  two  :  and  in  the 
midst  of  all  the  gay  glittering  and  eddied  lin- 
gering, the  noble  bearing  by  of  the  midmost 
depth,  so  mighty,  yet  so  terrorless  and  harm- 
less, with  its  swallows  skimming  instead  of  pe- 
trels, and  the  dear  old  decrepit  town  as  safe  in 
the  embracing  sweep  of  it  as  if  it  were  set  in  a 
brooch  of  sapphire." 

Critics  of  the  stereotyped  order  may 
doubt  whether  such  lyrical  prose  is  at  all 
justifiable,  or  whether  alliteration  is  not 
a  blemish  in  prose  writing.  They  may 


measure  with  their  joiner's  rod  and  weigh 
in  their  chemist's  scale ;  but  the  fact  re- 
mains that  so  far  as  written  words  have 
a  justification,  their  sound  and  sequence 
have  or  ought  to  have  a  function  in  con- 
veying adequately  the  meaning,  as  much 
as  their  immediate  grammatical  symbol- 
ism. 

Lessing,  in  his  fundamental,  though 
somewhat  narrow,  work  on  criticism, 
Laokoony  in  which  he  defines  the  prov- 
ince of  the  various  arts,  especially  paint- 
ing and  poetry,  has  drawn  attention  to 
the  chief  distinctive  means  of  expression 
of  the  various  arts,  which  necessarily  de- 
fine and  modify  their  different  provinces. 
Painting  and  sculpture  find  expression  by 
means  of  material  form  and  color,  litera- 
ture and  poetry  by  means  of  words.  The 
pictorial  and  plastic  arts  are  the  arts  of 
space-continuity,  and  thus  differ  essential- 
ly from  the  literary  arts,  which  deal  with 
time-succession,  in  which  words  are  read 
and  heard.  Whereas  the  chief  character- 
istic of  pictorial  art  in  its  description  is 
the  harmony  of  things  as  they  actually 
coexist  at  any  given  time,  the  chief  ele- 


93 

ment  of  description  in  words  is  succes- 
sion, and  this  succession  can  only  inad- 
equately reproduce  the  complete  impres- 
sion of  actual  coexistence.  Lessing  thus 
maintains  that,  in  conformity  with  this 
essential  nature  of  word  description,  the 
best  and  most  successful  endeavors  must 
correspond  to  it ;  and  whereas  sculpture 
and  painting  are  not  most  adapted  to  the 
rendering  of  movement  and  action,  and 
can  only  attain  this  by  the  most  expressive 
and  life -suggesting  moments  of  repose, 
poetic  description  is  not  best  adapted,  on 
its  side,  to  the  conveyance  of  images  the 
essence  of  which  is  the  complete  unity  of 
their  parts  in  the  repose  of  each  moment. 
When  poetry  does  attempt  to  describe 
things  in  repose,  it  does  it  best  by  means 
of  the  manifestation  of  the  unity  of  the 
body  or  scene,  and  the  interrelation  of 
their  parts  in  movement  and  action.  He 
is  no  doubt  right  when  he  considers  the 
dramatic  form  of  description  most  natu- 
rally adapted  to  literature ;  but  he  appears 
to  me  to  overshoot  the  mark  in  too  em- 
phatically excluding  the  enumeration  of 
the  individual  features  of  the  object  de- 


scribed,  which  can  be  done  in  a  really  lit- 
erary and  poetic  manner.  We  must  not 
forget  that  the  habit  of  looking  upon 
paintings  has,  in  the  course  of  ages,  given 
a  pictorial  faculty  to  our  mind  as  a  whole, 
and  that  modern  man,  without  an  effort, 
can  reconstruct  into  a  new  picture  of  the 
inner  eye  the  detached  portions  of  the  im- 
age which  are  transmitted  to  him  through 
the  ear,  provided  there  is  added  another 
sensuous  vehicle,  tending  towards  this  so- 
lidification, and  directly  producing  unity 
in  his  general  mood,  in  the  color  of  which 
the  disjointed  sound-units  will  naturally 
be  united.  This  accompanying  sensuous 
element  I  should  characterize  in  one 
word  as  the  lyrical  factor,  whether  in 
poetry  or  prose.  It  is  this  element  which 
supplies  the  requisite  insisted  upon  by 
Lessing  in  his  "  dramatic  character  of 
word  description  "  when  he  points  out 
that  we  are,  for  instance,  more  likely  to 
receive  an  adequate  impression  of  the  ap- 
pearance of  a  man  if,  as  poetry  can  best 
do,  the-impression  which  his  person  and 
his  actions  make  upon  others  is  given, 
rather  than  the  enumeration  of  his  indi- 


vidual  features,  such  as  the  color  of  his 
eyes,  the  shape  of  his  nose,  and  the  pro- 
portions of  his  figure.  In  this  dramatic 
form  of  description  the  element  of  sym- 
pathy is  called  into  play,  which  produces 
definite  moods  in  us,  and  sensualizes  and 
solidifies  the  vague  units  of  sounds  in  time 
and  succession  into  the  actual  consistency 
of  an  image.  Now  I  hold  that  with  re- 
gard to  scenes  in  nature  in  especial  this 
sympathetic  chord  of  inner  mood  (Stim- 
mung)  is  supplied  by  that  element  of 
sound  in  which  the  quality  of  the  word 
and  the  expressive  harmony  of  the  con- 
text, together  with  general  rhythm  and 
structure  directly,  sensuously  (like  a  mu- 
sical accompaniment),  create  a  sympa- 
thetic mood,  which  lasts  through  the  suc- 
cession of  time  in  which  the  description 
is  read  or  heard,  and  gives  its  bodily  uni- 
ty and  tangibility  to  each  word-unit  that 
would  otherwise  die  the  moment  its  actual 
sound  is  ended.  I  think  that  one  of  the 
model  instances  of  the  poetic  power  in 
description  of  nature  with  all  these  ele- 
ments combined  is  contained  in  the  short 
yet  powerful  description  of  Moldavian 


scenery  in  the  opening  of  Browning's 
"  Flight  of  the  Duchess."  Ruskin  in  his 
best  descriptions  of  nature  does  also  use 
movement  as  the  central  energy  of  his 
descriptive  motive.  Clouds  are  not  mere- 
ly square  or  round  or  multiform,  but  they 
move,  swing,  sweep,  or  hang  to  and  in 
their  various  shapes ;  their  colors  are 
growing  or  fading  in  intensity,  or  assert- 
ing some  relation  to  one  another;  nay, 
even  the  shape  of  each  rock  and  stone  and 
leaf  and  twig  is  described  in  the  varied 
motion  of  its  lines.  He  also  appeals  to 
dramatic  sympathy  in  recalling  the  an- 
alogies of  human  or  animal  life.  But 
above  all,  he  has  succeeded  in  breaking 
into  Lessing's  forbidden  boundaries  of 
enumeration,  because  his  progressive  ac- 
count is  fixed  and  chained  into  unity  and 
harmony  by  this  lyrical  character  of  his 
prose.  Take,  for  instance,  his  poetic  ren- 
dering of  Turner's  picture  of  Babylon, 
and  in  this  accurate  enumeration  we  feel 
that  there  is  a  justifiable  and  adequate 
transliteration  of  the  details  of  a  scene. 

41  Ten    miles    away,    down    the    Euphrates, 


where  it  gleams  last  along  the  plain,  he  gives 
us  a  drift  of  dark  elongated  vapor,  melted  be- 
neath into  a  dim  haze  which  embraces  the  hills 
on  the  horizon.  It  is  exhausted  with  its  own 
motion,  and  broken  by  the  wind  in  its  own 
body  into  numberless  groups  of  billowy  and 
tossing  fragments,  which,  beaten  by  the  weight 
of  storm  down  to  earth,  are  just  lifting  them- 
selves again  on  wearied  wings,  and  perishing 
in  the  effort.  Above  these,  and  far  beyond 
them,  the  eye  goes  back  to  a  broad  sea  of  white 
illuminated  mist,  or  rather  cloud  melted  into 
rain,  and  absorbed  again  before  that  rain  has 
fallen,  but  penetrated  throughout,  whether  it 
be  vapor  or  whether  it  be  dew,  with  soft  sun  • 
shine  turning  it  as  white  as  snow.  Gradually, 
as  it  rises,  the  rainy  fusion  ceases  ;  you  cannot 
tell  where  the  film  of  blue  on  the  left  begins — 
but  it  is  deepening,  deepening  still — and  the 
cloud,  with  its  edge  first  invisible,  then  all  but 
imaginary,  then  just  felt  when  the  eye  is  not 
fixed  on  it  and  lost  when  it  is,  at  last  rises  keen 
from  excessive  distance,  but  soft  and  mantling 
in  its  body  as  a  swan's  bosom  fretted  by  faint 
wind,  heaving  fitfully  against  the  delicate  deep 
blue,  with  white  waves,  whose  forms  are  traced 
by  the  pale  lines  of  .opalescent  shadow,  shade 
only  because  the  light  is  within  it  and  not  upon 
it,  and  which  break  with  their  own  swiftness 


98 


into  a  driven  line  of  level  spray,  winnowed  into 
threads  by  the  wind,  and  flung  before  the  fol- 
lowing vapor  like  those  swift  shafts  of  arrowy 
water  which  a  great  cataract  shoots  into  the 
air  beside  it,  trying  to  find  the  earth.  Beyond 
these,  again,  rises  a  colossal  mountain  of  gray 
cumulus,  through  whose  shadowed  sides  the 
sunbeams  penetrate  in  dim,  sloping,  rain- like 
shafts,  and  over  which  they  fall  in  a  broad 
burst  of  streaming  light,  sinking  to  the  earth, 
and  showing  through  their  own  visible  radiance 
the  three  successive  ranges  of  hills  which  con- 
nect its  desolate  plain  with  space.  Above,  the 
edgy  summit  of  the  cumulus,  broken  into  frag- 
ments, recedes  into  the  sky,  which  is  peopled 
in  its  serenity  with  quiet  multitudes  of  the 
white,  soft,  silent  cirrus,  and  under  these  again 
drift  near  the  zenith  disturbed  and  impatient 
shadows  of  a  darker  spirit,  seeking  rest  and 
finding  none." — Modern  Painters,  vol.  i.,  chap, 
iii.,  sec.  16. 

No  doubt  the  effectiveness  of  such  a 
description  depends  to  a  great  extent 
upon  the  movement  which  he  puts  into 
every  part  of  his  description  ;  but  besides 
that,  the  whole  is  transferred  from  life- 
less enumeration  to  a  vivid  image  before 
the  eyes  of  the  spectator,  because  of  the 


99 

assistance  of  that  lyrical  element  in 
which  the  quality  of  the  words,  such  as, 
"  drift  of  dark  elongated  vapor,"  "  billowy 
and  tossing  fragments,"  "  film  of  blue," 
"  keen  from  excessive  distance,"  "  swan's 
bosom  fretted  by  faint  wind,"  "  broad 
burst  of  streaming  light,"  "quiet  multi- 
tudes of  the  white,  soft,  silent  cirrus," 
gives  sensuous  consistency  to  the  mo- 
mentary sound  -  suggestion  of  a  word. 
Further,  the  very  succession  of  sounds 
themselves  is  used  to  evoke  actual  emo- 
tional sympathy  in  the  hearer  with  un- 
emotional nature ;  so  that  when  after  the 
rain  the  rainy  fusion  melts  into  blue,  and 
he  introduces  the  parenthetical  phrases 
telling  us  of  its  "  deepening,  deepening 
still,"  this  repetition  causes  the  reader,  by 
the  effort  of  catching  the  same  sound 
twice  over,  to  experience  an  inner  process 
corresponding  to  the  gradual  gradation 
in  the  tone  and  color  which  Turner  gives 
at  once  in  material  presence.  Further- 
more, the  general  rise  and  fall  and  cadence 
of  the  rhythm  help  in  the  same  way  to 
express  sensuously  what  the  words  them- 
selves could  only  give  in  their  inadequate 


disjointed  manner ;  as  when,  in  the  sen- 
tence with  regard  to  the  background  be- 
ginning, "  Above  these  and  far  beyond 
them,"  the  first  two-thirds  move  upward 
in  a  stronger  impetus,  suggesting  the 
varied  restlessness  in  line  and  color  of 
rain  clouds,  the  movement  is,  as  it  were, 
turned  downward  again  towards  repose, 
and  conciliated  in  the  rhyttim  of  the  end- 
ing parts  of  the  period  beginning,  "  but 
penetrated  throughout ; "  and  this  down- 
ward movement  or  lower  notes  that  com- 
plete the  whole  of  this  description  har- 
monize with  the  final  image  of  the  "  dark- 
er spirit  seeking  rest  and  finding  none." 
If  one  were  further  to  analyze  passages 
like  this,  one  would  find  that  in  the  struct- 
ure of  the  whole,  in  the  rise  and  fall  of 
rhythm,  and  the  composition  of  these  con- 
tinuous waves  of  sound,  they  correspond 
to  and  enforce  the  definite  meaning  and 
import  of  the  thoughts  and  scenes  con- 
veyed. 

Yet,  in  my  opinion,  in  no  passage  has 
he  succeeded  so  completely  in  giving  ar- 
tistic organization  and  life  to  the  phenom- 
ena of  nature  as  such,  as  in  his  descrip- 


tion  of  the  sky's  history  during  one  day, 
viewed  from  the  Alps. 

4 '  Stand  upon  the  peak  of  some  isolated 
mountain  at  daybreak,  when  the  night  mists 
first  rise  from  off  the  plains,  and  watch  their 
white  and  lake-like  fields  as  they  float  in  level 
bays  and  winding  gulfs  about  ihe  islanded  sum- 
mits  of  the  lower  hills,  untouched  yet  fry  niore' 
than  dawn,  colder  and  more  quiet  than  a  wind- 
less sea  under  the  moon  o^v  friiVlnighJt*;  'watch 
when  the  first  sunbeam  is  sent  upon  the  silver 
channels,  how  the  foam  of  their  undulating  sur- 
face parts  and  passes  away  ;  and  down  under 
their  depths  the  glittering  city  and  green  past- 
ure lie  like  Atlantis  between  the  white  paths  of 
winding  rivers,  the  flakes  of  light  falling  every 
moment  faster  and  broader  among  the  starry 
spires  as  the  wreathed  surges  break  and  vanish 
above  them,  and  the  confused  crests  and  ridges 
of  the  dark  hills  shorten  their  gray  shadows 
upon  the  plain.  Wait  a  little  longer  and  you 
shall  see  those  scattered  mists  rallying  in  the 
ravines,  and  floating  up  towards  you  along  the 
winding  valleys,  till  they  couch  in  quiet  masses, 
iridescent  with  the  morning  light,  upon  the 
broad  breasts  of  the  higher  hills,  whose  leagues 
of  massy  undulation  will  melt  back  and  back 
into  that  robe  of  material  light,  until  they  fade 


away,  lost  in  its  lustre,  to  appear  again  above, 
in  the  serene  heaven,  like  a  wild,  bright,  im- 
possible dream,  foundationless  and  inaccessi- 
ble, their  very  bases  vanishing  in  the  unsub- 
stantial and  mocking  blue  of  the  deep  lake  be- 
low. Wait  yet  a  little  longer  and  you  shall  see 
those  mists  gather  themselves  into  white  tow- 
ers, and  stand  like  fortresses  along  the  promon- 
tories, mas.^y  and  motionless,  only  piled  with 
every  instant  higher  and  higher  into  the  sky, 
swidtca'stikg  lorgcr .shadows  athwart  the  rocks; 
and  out  of  the  pale  blue  of  the  horizon  you  will 
see  forming  and  advancing  a  troop  of  narrow, 
dark,  pointed  vapors,  which  will  cover  the  sky, 
inch  by  inch,  with  their  gray  net-work,  and 
take  the  light  off  the  landscape  with  an  eclipse 
which  will  stop  the  singing  of  the  birds  and  the 
motion  of  the  leaves  together ;  and  then  you 
will  see  horizontal  bars  of  black  shadow  form- 
ing under  them,  and  lurid  wreaths  create  them- 
selves, you  know  not  how,  along  the  shoulders 
of  the  hills  ;  you  never  see  them  form,  but  when 
you  look  back  to  a  place  which  was  clear  an  in- 
stant ago,  there  is  a  cloud  on  it,  hanging  by  the 
precipices,  as  a  hawk  pauses  over  his  prey.  And 
then  you  will  hear  the  sudden  rush  of  the  awak- 
ened wind,  and  you  will  see  those  watch-tow- 
ers of  vapor  swept  away  from  their  foundations, 
and  waving  curtains  of  opaque  rain  let  down  to 


the  valleys,  swinging  from  the  burdened  clouds 
in  black  bending  fringes,  or  pacing  in  pale  col- 
umns along  the  lake  level,  grazing  its  surface 
into  foam  as  they  go.  And  then  as  the  sun 
sinks  you  shall  see  the  storm  drift  for  an  instant 
from  off  the  hills,  leaving  their  broad  sides 
smoking,  and  loaded  yet  with  snow-white,  torn, 
steam-like  rays  of  capricious  vapor,  now  gone, 
now  gathered  again,  while  the  smouldering 
sun,  seeming  not  far  away,  but  burning  like  a 
red-hot  ball  beside  you,  and  as  if  you  could 
reach  it,  plunges  through  the  rushing  wind  and 
rolling  cloud  with  headlong  fall,  as  if  it  meant 
to  rise  no  more,  dyeing  all  the  air  about  it  with 
blood.  And  then  you  shall  hear  the  fainting 
tempest  die  in  the  hollow  of  the  night,  and  you 
shall  see  a  green  halo  kindling  on  the  summit 
of  the  eastern  hills,  brighter,  brighter  yet,  till 
the  large  white  circle  of  the  slow  moon  is  lifted 
up  among  the  barred  clouds,  step  by  step,  line 
by  line  ;  star  after  star  she  quenches  with  her 
kindling  light,  setting  in  their  stead  an  army 
of  pale,  penetrable,  fleecy  wreaths  in  the  heav- 
en, to  give  light  i*pon  the  earth,  which  move 
together,  hand  in  hand,  company  by  company, 
troop  by  troop,  so  measured  in  their  unity  of 
motion  that  the  whole  heaven  seems  to  roll 
with  them,  and  the  earth  to  reel  under  them. 
And  then  wait  yet  for  one  hour,  until  the  east 


again  becomes  purple,  and  the  heaving  mount- 
ains, rolling  against  it  in  darkness  like  waves 
of  a  wild  sea,  are  drowned  one  by  one  in  the 
glory  of  its  burning  ;  watch  the  white  glaciers 
blaze  in  their  winding  paths  about  the  mount- 
ains, like  mighty  serpents  with  scales  of  fire  ; 
watch  the  columnar  peaks  of  solitary  snow, 
kindling  downward,  chasm  by  chasm,  each  in 
itself  a  new  morning  ;  their  long  avalanches 
cast  down  in  keen  streams  brighter  than  the 
lightning,  sending  each  its  tribute  of  driven 
snow-like  altar  smoke  up  to  heaven  ;  the  rose- 
light  of  their  silent  domes  flushing  that  heaven 
about  them  or  above  them,  piercing  with  purer 
light  through  its  purple  lines  of  lifted  cloud, 
casting  a  new  glory  on  every  wreath  as  it  pass- 
es by,  until  the  whole  heaven — one  scarlet  can- 
opy— is  interwoven  with  a  roof  of  waving  flame, 
and  tossing,  vault  beyond  vault,  as  with  the 
drifted  wings  of  many  companies  of  angels  ; 
and  then,  when  you  can  look  no  more  for  glad- 
ness, and  when  you  are  bowed  down  with  fear 
and  love  of  the  Maker  and  Doer  of  all  this,  tell 
me  who  has  best  delivered*  this  His  message 
unto  men  !" — Modern  Painters,  vol.  i.,  end  of 
chap.  iv. 

Ruskin  as  a  writer  of   English  stands 
unrivalled,  except  perhaps  by  Shelley,  for 


the  completeness  and  wealth  of  his  vo- 
cabulary (which  we  must  marvel  at  still 
more  when  we  are  told  by  him  in  his 
Prater  it  a  that  he  always  wrote  easily, 
without  any  struggle),  and  for  his  feeling 
for  the  quality  of  words.  It  is  to  be  re- 
gretted that  he  sometimes  chooses  to  give 
paradoxical  significance  and  restricted  de- 
notations of  his  own  to  ordinary  words, 
especially  in  his  more  sober  and  theoreti- 
cal expositions,  as  when,  in  chapter  iii. 
of  Vol.  i.,  Modern  Painters,  he  calls  the 
words  mystery  and  inadequacy  elements 
of  power,  or  uses  the  word  particular 
where  he  means  essential ;  or  speaks  of 
historical  truths  where  he  means  essential 
truths,  or  defines  excellent  or  pretty  or 
any  other  ordinary  term  in  an  extraordi- 
nary manner.  But  these  irritating  con- 
fusions, which  also  apply  to  the  titles  of 
his  books,  generally  occur  in  his  more 
scientific  disquisitions,  where,  it  is  true, 
they  do  incalculable  harm  in  misleading 
him  as  well  as  his  readers ;  and  I  feel  cer- 
tain that  the  use  that  he  makes  of  the 
word  imperfection  or  particular  and 
many  others  is  at  the  bottom  of  many 


io6 


fallacies  into  which  he  has  been  led  and 
leads  others.  But  where  he  is  purely  de- 
scriptive this  does  not  happen  to  the 
same  degree. 

Within  the  variety  of  rhythmical 
changes  which  he  introduces  in  harmony 
with  the  meaning  he  conveys,  there  is  one 
general  rhythm  peculiarly  his  own ;  it 
has,  if  I  may  so  say,  a  gentle  undulating 
character,  swelling  gradually  to  a  point 
of  general  position,  and  then  dying  away 
into  what  almost  appears  a  minor  key  in 
a  negative  limitation,  with  which  minor 
key  his  periods  generally  end.  That  there 
is  such  a  general  character  to  the  rhythm 
of  his  writings  can  here  be  illustrated  by 
comparing  in  this  respect  parts  of  the 
passage,  from  which  I  have  quoted,  on  the 
open  sky  with  some  in  the  description  of 
the  Rhone.  Compare,  for  instance,  with 
regard  to  their  rhythmical  arrangement, 
the  passage  on  the  Rhone  beginning, 
"  For  all  other  rivers  there  is  a  surface," 
etc.,  and  then  its  limitation  down  to  "  radi- 
ant to  the  depth,"  with  the  passage  on  the 
sky  beginning  with  "  The  noblest  scenes 
of  the  earth, "and  ending  with  "  purifying 


io7 

it  from  its  dross  and  dust."  Compare, 
again,  this  last  passage,  from  its  beginning 
down  to  "what  is  mortal  or  essential," 
with  another  paragraph  in  the  Rhone  de- 
scription beginning  with  "  Waves  of  clear 
sea  are,"  and  ending  with  "  forever  from 
her  snow,"  and  I  am  sure  my  meaning 
will  be  clear.  This  beautiful  rise  and  fall 
of  cadence  is  probably  due  to  his  early 
and  constant  reading  of  the  Bible,  and 
especially  the  rhythmical  responsion  in 
the  Psalms ;  and  there  is  no  doubt  that 
his  feeling  for  words  and  much  of  his 
grand  style  originally  are  derived  from 
the  same  source.  He  is  often  quite  bibli- 
cal in  the  character  of  his  diction,  espe- 
cially when  he  is  preaching.  Take,  for 
instance,  the  passage  from  paragraph  5 
to  8  in  the  chapter  on  the  Theoretic  Fac- 
ulty in  the  second  volume  of  Modern 
Painters,  where  he  inveighs  against  "the 
vine-dressers  and  husbandmen  who  love 
the  corn  they  grind  and  the  grapes  they 
crush  better  than  the  gardens  of  the  angels 
upon  the  slopes  of  Eden  ;  hewers  of  wood 
and  drawers  of  water,  who  think  that  the 
wood  they  hew  and  the  water  they  draw 


io8 


are  better  than  the  pine  forests  that  cover 
the  mountains  like  the  shadow  of  God, 
and  than  the  great  rivers  that  move  like 
His  eternity,"  etc.  No  doubt  he  owes 
much  of  the  beauty  of  his  style  to  his  early 
Bible-reading,  and  we  feel  its  powerful  in- 
fluence especially  where  he  is  solemn  or 
divinely  simple  in  his  description.  Even 
his  simplicity  is  thus  biblical  and  weighty. 
But  its  influence  has  not  always  been  for 
the  good ;  for  it  has  sometimes  counter- 
acted clearness  and  sobriety  of  diction  in 
ordinary  language,  and  in  its  quasi-archaic 
character  it  is  not  really  simple  in  the 
modern  sense,  though  it  be  simple  in  its 
primitive  weightiness.  And  often,  when 
he  means  to  be  sober  and  analytical,  his 
mood  becomes  exalted,  and  is  carried  to 
a  high  pitch,  leading  to  a  diction  that  is 
too  strongly  lyrical  and  antithetical,  when 
he  ought  to  be  merely  simple,  lucid,  and 
sober.  His  apparent  sobriety  is  then  al- 
most ironical  sobriety,  and  has  the  appear- 
ance of  trembling  with  sustained  emotion. 
This  habit  is  not  conducive  to  the  best 
work  when  he  means  to  be  purely  theo- 
retical. On  the  other  hand,  there  are  pas- 


sages  of  powerful  sober  antithesis,  such 
as  we  find  in  his  warning  to  young  art- 
ists against  brilliancy  of  execution  or  ef- 
forts at  invention,  in  the  2oth  paragraph 
of  chapter  iii.,  section  6,  Part  II.,  of  Mod- 
ern Painters ;  and  here  also  he  manifests 
his  power  of  epigram,  which  the  more 
diffuse  character  of  his  writings  would 
not  lead  us  to  expect.  But  when  he  does 
indulge  in  aphorisms,  they  are  very  good, 
as,  for  instance,  his  epigrammatic  defini- 
tion of  symmetry  as  contrasted  with  pro- 
portion :  "  Symmetry  is  opposition  of  equal 
quantities  to  each  other,  proportion  the 
connection  of  unequal  quantities  with  each 
other."  Or  another  :  "  All  copyists  are 
contemptible,  but  the  copyist  of  himself 
is  the  most  so,  for  he  has  the  worst  origi- 
nal." The  latter  epigram  also  has  a  touch 
of  ironical  humor,  which  he  often  mani- 
fests, as  when  he  reviles  Gaspar  Poussin's 
picture  of  a  storm  :  "  Storms,  indeed,  as 
the  innocent  public  insist  on  calling  such 
abuses  of  nature  and  abortions  of  art  as 
the  two  windy  Caspars  in  our  National 
Gallery,  are  common  enough  —  massive 
concretions  of  ink  and  indigo  wrung  and 


twisted  very  hard,  apparently  in  a  vain  ef- 
fort to  get  some  moisture  out  of  them, 
bearing  up  courageously  and  successfully 
against  a  wind  whose  effects  on  the  trees 
in  the  foreground  can  be  accounted  for 
only  on  the  supposition  that  they  are  all 
of  the  India-rubber  species."  But  genuine 
light  humor  is  not  made  to  his  hand,  and 
there  are  more  traces  of  it  in  his  latest 
work,  Prceterita,  than  in  any  of  his  previ- 
ous writings.  For  this  he  has  not  suffi- 
cient sympathy  with  the  real  healthy  life 
that  surrounds  him  ;  and  in  spite  of  his 
noble  humanitarian  preaching  and  his  still 
nobler  philanthropic  life  and  example,  his 
works  tlo  not  set  before  us  a  man  of  wide 
and  real  sympathies  with  the  life  about 
him.  The  publication  of  his  Prceterita 
shows  how  deficient  his  education  was  in 
encouraging  this  side  in  him.  This  makes 
him  all  the  greater;  yet  it  must  have 
hampered  him  frequently  in  the  just  con- 
sideration of  social,  economical,  and  po- 
litical questions. 


IV 

RUSKIN  AS  A  WRITER  ON  SOCIAL,  POLITI- 
CAL, AND   ECONOMICAL   QUESTIONS 

IN  the  field  of  practical  ethics  and  poli- 
tics Ruskin's  tendency  to  preach  finds  a 
more  suitable  and  just  scope  than  in  the 
more  theoretical  spheres  of  his  literary 
activity.  And  his  great  literary  power  of 
diction  has  enabled  him  to  give  new  form 
and  emphasis  to  principles  that  have  al- 
most been  adopted  by  us  as  moral  com- 
monplaces, however  little  they  may  have 
been  acted  upon,  and  do  show  in  glaring 
light  the  contradiction  which  obtains  be- 
tween the  higher  moral  and  religious  ten- 
ets and  the  ordinary  working  traditions 
of  modern  society.  He  has  thus  become 
one  of  the  foremost  writers  on  what  might 
be  called  practical  sociology  or  economic 
ethics.  And  there  does  appear  to  be  a 
great  and  ever-growing  need  for  this  form 


of  activity.  At  present  we  only  have  the 
spiritual  guidance  of  the  clergy,  or  the 
theories  of  scientific  and  philosophical 
writers.  On  the  one  hand,  we  have  the 
ministers  of  religion,  who  claim  that  the 
basis  of  their  theory  and  practice  is  di- 
rectly inspired  and  supranatural,  and  who 
appeal  to  the  highest  human  emotions, 
namely,  the  religious  feelings.  The  re- 
sult is  that,  in  the  minds  of  those  who  are 
to  be  influenced,  the  step  from  the  lofti- 
ness of  these  thoughts  and  emotions  to 
the  humbleness  and  minute  multiplicity 
of  the  ordinary  acts  of  daily  life  is  not 
always  readily  or  efficiently  made  ;  while 
the  ministers  of  the  inspired  Word,  speak- 
ing from  their  elevated  position,  are  not 
always  credited  by  the  plain  and  practical 
listeners  with  experience  of  the  needs  and 
demands  of  daily  life,  with  being  able  to 
guide  them  soundly  and  soberly  within 
this  realm.  On  the  other  hand,  students 
of  ethics  have  hitherto  been  too  much 
taken  up  with  the  purely  theoretical  prin- 
ciples of  human  action,  more  especially 
with  the  broadest  fundamental  principles 
of  right  and  wrong,  to  have  produced  a 


really  practical  guide  to  the  conduct  of 
modern  life.  Even  those  writers  on 
ethics  and  sociology  who  claim  to  fol- 
low the  inductive  method  have  directed 
their  observation  either  towards  the  psy- 
chology of  man,  or  have  examined  him 
historically  or  politically  in  large  groups; 
but  they  have  never  ventured,  in  their  at- 
tempts at  generalization,  to  attack  the  act- 
ual social  and  domestic  ethics  of  the  life 
that  is  before  us,  entering  into  the  duties 
of  definite  professions  and  occupations,  of 
the  employer  to  the  employed,  the  master 
to  the  servant,  the  housewife  to  the  house- 
hold, and  other  similar  relations,  the  ma- 
terials for  the  observation  of  which  are 
constantly  before  our  eyes.  Ethical  in- 
quiry seems  chiefly  to  rotate  round  the 
fundamental  principles  of  transcendental- 
ism and  utilitarianism,  egoism,  altruism, 
and  other  problems  concerning  the  actual 
or  desirable  motives  to  human  action  in 
general.  It  may  be  that  these  complex 
facts  of  simple  daily  life  are  as  yet  beyond 
the  reach  of  sound  classification  and  sci- 
entific apprehension  ;  yet  we  cannot  help 
feeling  their  great  practical  use.  How- 


•^l" 


ever  imperfect  it  may  at  first  be,  we  can- 
not doubt  the  gain  to  scientific  ethics  of 
an  attempt  at  exposition  or  codification 
of  the  principles  and  rules  that  guide  or 
ought  to  guide  our  immediate  conduct, 
based  upon  the  careful  and  systematic  ob- 
servation of  this  daily  life,  if  made  by  one 
trained  in  theoretical  ethics,  and  other- 
wise qualified  by  sympathy,  experience, 
and  power  of  exposition  to  observe  and  to 
record  the  results  of  his  observation  in 
this  sphere  of  ethical  induction.  Much 
that  is  now  scattered  among  the  writings 
of  our  essayists  and  in  the  religious  and 
secular  maxims  of  wise  men,  much  of  the 
writings  of  the  casuists  among  the  school- 
men, all  brought  together  under  the  con- 
tinuous and  concentrated  effort  of  one 
line  of  systematic  thought,  would  then 
become  the  work  of  this  modern  ethician 
and  sociologist.  He  would  be  a  bold  man 
who  would  undertake  the  task  ;  but,  if  at 
all  well  done,  however  far  from  present- 
ing us  with  an  absolute  canon,  it  would 
undoubtedly  be  a  great  profit  to  man-x 
kind. 

Between  the  priest,  on  the  one  hand, 


and  the  theoretical  ethician,  on  the  other, 
lies  the  activity  in  the  sphere  of  sociology 
and  economics  of  writers  like  Ruskin. 
He  has,  like  Carlyle,  whose  disciple  he 
claims  to  be,  boldly  attacked  the  leading  < 
vice  of  our  age,  which  he  would  consider 
to  be  the  predominance  of  the  mercenary 
and  commercial  spirit,  and  a  correspond-  j 
ing  and  consequent  lowness  of  all  our 
ideals  of  life.  Against  this  persistent  vi- 
cious force  nothing,  however  lofty,  how- 
ever holy,  can  hold  its  ground  in  the  esti- 
mation of  our  majorities  as  a  chief  incen- 
tive to  action.  In  his  drastic  manner  he 
has  described  this  spirit  of  cupidity  in  the 
most  powerful  terms,  but  in  none  more 
pithily  than  in  the  passage  in  Fors 
Clamgera  relating  to  the  benevolence 
leading  to  railway  enterprise  :  "  The  be- 
nevolence involved  in  the  construction  of 
railways  amounts  exactly  to  this  much 
and  no  more — that  if  the  British  public 
were  informed  that  engineers  were  now 
confident,  after  their  practice  in  the  Cenis 
and  St.  Gothard  tunnels,  that  they  could 
make  a  railway  to  hell,  the  British  pub- 
lic would  instantly  invest  in  the  concern 


to  any  amount,  and  stop  church  building 
all  over  the  country  for  fear  of  diminish- 
ing the  dividends." 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  ideals 
arising  out  of  this  predominant  merce- 
nary and  commercial  spirit  have  eaten 
at  the  marrow  of  many  of  the  cardinal 
virtues  of  the  past,  of  those  demanded  by 
the  tasks  of  the  present,  and  of  those  to 
be  hoped  for  in  order  that  we  may  create 
a  progressive  future.  There  are  number- 
less people  who  consider  themselves  virt- 
uous, and  are  recognized  to  be  so  by  their 
neighbors,  to  whom  the  "getting  on" 
ideal  is  ultimately  the  highest  and  lead- 
ing motive  of  their  life.  Stories  of  ex- 
ceeding parsimony,  of  the  continued  res- 
ignation of  all  other  aims  in  life  to  the 
toilsome  wrestling  with  untoward  cir- 
cumstance, until  step  by  step  men  shall 
have  advanced  in  the  social  scale  and  in 
wealth  (or  rather  in  wealth,  and  there- 
fore in  the  social  scale),  at  the  cost  of  all 
other  instincts  of  human  life,  that  are  re- 
pressed or  extirpated  in  view  of  the  one 
golden  or  gilt  beacon-light  of  success,  are, 
in  the  simplicity  of  a  low  moral  standard, 


held  up  as  instances  of  virtue  worthy  of 
emulation;  while  cringing  public  honor 
and  consideration  are  based  upon  those 
signs  and  tokens  which  are  impressed 
upon  the  metal  by  a  mint  recognized  in 
the  market-place.  However  much  insin- 
cere cant  there  may  often  be  in  those 
who  inveigh  in  a  romantic  spirit  against 
the  industrial  life  of  modern  times,  com- 
paring it  with  the  life  of  the  past,  there 
does  appear  to  me  to  be  one  symptom 
of  disease  marking  our  moral  life  in 
which  we  differ  from  other  periods.  This 
is  perhaps  the  necessary  concomitant  of 
this  period  of  transition  in  which  we  live. 
It  is  to  be  found  in  the  want  of  clearness 
and  singleness  in  our  moral  ideals  with 
regard  to  the  position  of  wealth,  and  the 
vacillation  in  our  standard  of  moral  ap- 
probation as  professed  and  as  followed  by 
our  ruling  majorities.  In  more  barbarous 
ages,  or  in  the  periods  of  chivalry,  person- 
al valor,  however  brutal  in  its  results, 
was  recognized  as  a  virtue  actuating  the 
efforts  and  filling  the  life  of  the  aspirant 
to  honors.  This  the  striving  man  hon- 
estly and  fully  believed  to  be  good,  and 


u8 


public  esteem  followed  the  realization  of 
his  virtuous  effort. 

In  our  highest  moral  moods  we  consid- 
er the  "  man's  the  gowd  for  a'  that,"  and 
affect  contempt  for  worldly  goods  and 
advancement,  admiring  the  unworldly 
worker  who  substitutes  the  wealth  of  his 
own  moral  or  intellectual  life  for  the  dross 
of  riches ;  while  the  general  public  esti- 
mation, the  public  consciousness,  as  the 
Germans  call  it,  still  shows  HS  approval 
of  social  consideration  to  the  acquisition 
or  possession  of  great  wealth.  This  con- 
tradiction in  our  moral  life  is  a  feature 
distinguishing  our  age  from  those  that 
have  preceded  us.  The  future  will  work 
out  this  problem,  either  by  reconciliation 
of  the  two  contending  factors  or  by  dis- 
solution of  the  one  or  the  other.  It  is 
against  this  idol  that  Ruskin  hurls  his 
most  powerful  invective,  and  he  preach- 
es with  convincing  strength  and  direct- 
ness on  the  inner  virtues  which  outshine 
the  false  light  of  the  "  getting  on  "  ideal. 
He  urges  strongly  and  forcibly  that  the 
excellence  of  man  does  not  depend  upon 
the  standing  or  scale  of  his  profession  or 


occupation,  but  upon  his  standing  in  his 
profession  or  occupation,  whatever  it  may 
be ;  and  he  impresses  upon  every  man  the 
duty  not  to  rise  out  of  his  profession  into 
another  supposedly  higher  one,  but  to 
make  himself  and  his  vocation  better  and 
higher  by  his  noble  efforts  within  its  ? 
sphere.  In  his  domestic  life  he  has,  be- 
fore all,  to  find  his  house  and  fix  his  home, 
embellishing  it  and  enlarging  it,  if  needs 
be,  but  not  shaking  its  moral  foundations 
by  an  ever-present  degrading  hope  of 
moving  to  a  larger  one.  Whatever  ele- 
ments of  communism  or  socialism  there 
may  be  in  Ruskin's  writings,  there  is  in 
this  side  of  them  a  strong  individualistic 
ground,  in  which  the  domestic  life  of  the 
family  is  held  by  him  to  form  one  of  the 
main  pillars  of  social  and  political  wel- 
fare. He  also  endeavors  to  define  the 
province  of  woman  in  this  well-regulated 
life ;  and  though  his  manner  here  often 
has  a  touch  of  flowery  condescension  or 
unsimple  simplicity,  he  assigns  to  her  the 
deeply  important  function  of  the  true 
woman  and  mother. 

But  his  ethical  teaching  does  not  only 


apply  to  the  life  of  individuals  ;  he  has  also 
turned  his  attention  to  the  life  of  the  na- 
tion as  a  whole,  and  in  this  national  life 
he  has  also  pointed  out  the  predominance 
of  the  mercenary  and  commercial  spirit. 
He  has  shown  what  undue  proportion  and 
engrossing  interest  are  given  to  the  mere 

i  / 1  commercial  and  financial  aspect  of  a 
country ;  and  he  has  levelled  his  satire 
and  invective  against  the  "  period  of  un- 
precedented prosperity"  which  formed  the 
staple  of  the  speeches  of  statesmen  touch- 
ing upon  the  inner  national  life  of  a  peo- 

^  pie.  He  has  pointed  out  at  what  cost  this 
commercial  prosperity  may  be  bought, 
not  only  to  the  advancement  of  the  nation 
as  a  whole,  but  to  the  citizens  who  pro- 
duce this  prosperity,  in  their  moral  and 
intellectual  as  well  as  their  physical  life. 
He  has  pointed  out  the  vicious  one-sided- 
ness  of  the  "  political  economists,"  whose 
teachings  form  the  only  theoretical  and 
scientific  groundwork  for  the  practical 
politician  of  the  day,  and  he  has  denied 
to  these  economists  the  designation  of 
political  economists,  distinguishing  be- 
tween political  economy,  which  "con- 


sists  simply  in  the  production,  preserva- 
tion, and  distribution,  at  fittest  time  and 
place,  of  useful  and  pleasurable  things," 
.  .  .  and  mercantile  economy,  which  sig- 
nifies "the  accumulation  in  the  hands 
of  individual^  of  legal  and  moral  claim 
upon  or  power  over  the  labor  of  others, 
every  such  claim  implying  precisely  as 
much  poverty  and  debt  on  one  side  as  it 
implies  riches  or  right  on  the  other."  It 
is  not  possible  here,  even  if  the  writer 
felt  himself  better  qualified  to  enter  upon 
the  discussion  of  definite  problems  of 
political  economy,  to  consider  Ruskin's 
views  of  co-operation,  distribution,  usury, 
etc.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  he  has  been 
one  of  the  most  powerful  exponents  of 
the  view  now  admitted  into  the  most 
sober  and  technical  systems  of  political 
economy :  that  this  science  or  art  is  not 
only  concerned  with  the  human  motive 
power  and  incentive  to  action  which  lies 
in  the  immediate  possessing  and  accu- 
mulating instinct  of  man,  and  the  blind 
working  of  these  forces  in  contending  in- 
terests (a  view  which  takes  man  in  a 
monstrous  and  one-sided  aspect),  but,  as 


it  deals  with  the  life  of  man,  it  must  also 
and    primarily  take    into   account,  and 
weigh  and  balance,  as  far  as  this  is  possi- 
ble, the  moral  desires  and  needs  of  civil- 
\    ized  human  beings.     In  one  word,  he  has 
1   reconciled  morality  and  economy,  which 
the  old   school   of   economists   had   di- 
vorced. 

It  appears  to  be  a  natural  phase  of  ev- 
ery young  science  in  modern  times,  aris- 
ing out  of  a  desire  to  approach  in  method 
the  exact  sciences,  whether  pure,  such  as 
mathematics,  or  experimental,  such  as 
chemistry  and  physics,  to  follow  them  in 
their  process  of  isolation  of  facts  and  phe- 
nomena, which  no  doubt  facilitates  the 
exactness  of  their  results  and  the  sure- 
ness  of  their  advance.  But  at  later  phases 
they  will  have  to  recognize  that,  where 
with  mathematical  figures  or  with  chem- 
ical elements  it  is  possible  to  isolate  phe- 
nomena without  impairing  their  essential 
quality,  as  we  rise  to  the  scale  of  organic 
life,  and  finally  to  human  thoughts  and 
feelings,  the  isolation  of  phenomena  does 
not  in  the  same  way  insure  certainty  of 
scientific  procedure,  but,  from  the  very 


organic  or  moral  nature  of  the  factors 
with  which  the  moral  and  historical  sci- 
ences have  to  deal,  alters,  disfigures,  and 
vitiates  the  essence  of  the  phenomena 
thus  isolated.  The  new  life  which  has 
been  given  of  late  to  the  study  of  politi- 
cal and  constitutional  history  may  have 
led  to  this  youthful  exaggeration  of  so- 
called  scientific  method ;  and  it  may  have 
to  be  recognized  that,  in  dealing  with  the 
life  of  the  past,  the  isolation  of  certain  as- 
pects within  one  period,  such  as  the  com- 
mercial life,  or  the  foreign  policy,  or  the 
party  influence,  when  carried  out  in  any- 
thing like  the  manner  in  which  this  is 
done  with  regard  to  the  physical  proper- 
ties of  solid  or  elastic  bodies,  may  distort 
and  disfigure  facts  and  their  relation.  This 
is  so  because  in  the  events  of  political  life 
other  varied  interests,  often  of  a  very  dif- 
ferent nature,  are  inseparably  interwoven 
with  these  broad  currents  of  national  ac- 
tion ;  and  the  pleasures  of  a  prince  or 
the  intrigues  of  a  woman,  or,  happily,  a 
moral  or  religious  idea,  may  modify  and 
strengthen  the  course  or  divert  the  cur- 
rent of  economical  or  foreign  policy.  To 


assume  that  in  political  economy  moral 
considerations  have  not,  and  will  not  have, 
a  great  regulating  influence,  is  as  false  to 
fact  as  the  views  of  many  doctrinaires, 
who  would  entirely  eliminate  the  moving 
power  of  material  interest,  are  Utopian. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  one-sided- 
ness  with  which  the  old  schools  of  econo- 
my proceeded  in  this  direction  only  had 
to  lead  to  a  reaction  within  the  body  of 
the  economists  themselves,  and  the  main 
elements  of  this  reaction  are  to  be  found 
strongly  put  among  all  the  writings  of 
men  like  Mill,  whom  Ruskin  would  re- 
gard as  one  of  the  chief  culprits  in  this 
one-sided  development  of  the  study.  And 
though  the  works  of  many  modern  writ- 
ers dealing  directly  or  only  remotely 
with  such  questions,  such  as  the  Comt- 
ists,  Kingsley,  Maurice,  George  Eliot,  and 
many  others,  have  paved  the  way  for  this 
healthy  revulsion,  Ruskin's  merit  in  this 
direction  is  incontestably  great,  and  may 
in  the  future  grow  in  the  recognition  of 
those  who  can  look  more  dispassionately 
upon  his  exaggerations,  and  with  more 
patience  upon  his  violent  petulance. 


125 


He  has  attacked  the  vicious  fallacies  in 
the  very  localities  of  their  growth,  the 
manufacturing  centres  of  England,  and 
has  preached  powerful  sermons,  which 
have  undoubtedly  had  the  effect  of  con- 
verting a  few,  of  stimulating  the  moral 
fibre  of  many,  and  of  causing  many  more 
to  seek  for  some  justification  in  the  course 
they  had  before  been  following  under  the 
assumption  that  what  they  were  doing 
was  wholly  right.  He  has  shown  to  many 
what  the  real  humanitarian  spirit  of  Chris- 
tian charity  in  its  present  form  is,  and 
how  far  it  differed  from  their  convenient 
belief  that  it  was  ordained  by  Providence 
that  the  circumstances  of  their  lives 
should  be  so  favorable  to  happiness,  where- 
as those  of  their  neighbors  were  so  preg- 
nant with  misery.  He  has  shaken  the 
merchant  and  manufacturer  out  of  their 
lazy  and  convenient  dulness,  in  which  their 
vocation  had  but  the  one  goal  of  increas- 
ing their  personal  wealth,  and  has  made 
them  realize  that  they  are  also  an  inte- 
gral member  of  organized  society  and  the 
state,  in  which  their  function  and  duty  in 
every  stage  of  their  vocation  tend  to  ef- 


126 


feet  the  well-being  of  the  whole  organiza- 
tion. He  has  insisted  upon  the  fact  that 
they  have  duties  beyond  the  mere  increase 
of  their  personal  wealth  in  the  following 
of  their  own  vocation,  as  much  as  the  sol- 
dier or  the  doctor  or  the  teacher  or  the 
priest,  who  could  not  consider  their  ef- 
forts to  be  exclusively  directed  towards  the 
acquisition  of  their  pay  or  fee  or  salary. 
He  considers  that  the  merchant  and  man- 
ufacturer have  primarily  the  duty  as  mas- 
ters to  the  servants  whom  they  employ, 
the  master  necessarily  becoming  in  the 
course  of  his  business  the  overseer  and 
governor  of  large  masses  of  men  in  the 
most  direct  way,  so  that  upon  him  falls 
in  a  great  part  the  responsibility  for  the 
kind  of  life  they  lead.  After  this  primary 
duty  is  seen  to,  the  main  task  of  the  mer- 
chant is  to  provide  for  the  proper  distri- 
bution of  goods  and  wealth,  and  of  the 
manufacturer  to  produce  the  best  and 
most  serviceable  goods.  Nay,  according  to 
him,  the  manufacturer  exists  for  the  sake 
of  the  workmen  employed  by  him,  and 
is  responsible  to  a  considerable  extent  for 
the  bodies  and  souls  of  his  employes,  as 


well  as  for  the  fabric  they  produce.  The 
overstatement  of  this  aspect  of  duty,  which 
may  be  a  literary  quality,  and  may  in  its 
strong  colors  serve  to  attract  attention, is 
nevertheless  to  my  mind  fatal  in  its  influ- 
ence, as,  on  the  one  hand,  causing  the 
votary  who  naturally  would  tend  in  this 
moral  direction  to  become  unbalanced  in 
his  enthusiasm,  and  unable  efficiently  to 
cope  with  the  practical  exigencies  of  life ; 
and  on  the  other,  from  its  exaggerated 
inaccuracy,  strengthening  the  doubt  of 
the  hardened  self-seeker,  and  giving  him 
justification  for  a  disbelief  in  such  "  un- 
practical ideals." 

These  injunctions  concerning  our  mut- 
ual happiness  and  dignity,  and  of  the  fur- 
thering of  the  common  social  aims,  ought 
certainly  to  be  a  negative  guide  in  check- 
ing the  positive  current  of  individual  in- 
terest, or  they  may  even  be  raised  into 
great  positive  ideals.  But  the  self-interest 
of  the  merchant  and  manufacturer  in  gain- 
ing their  own  livelihood,  and  in  increasing 
the  possibilities  of  their  own  efficiency  and 
happiness,  limited  by  the  due  regard  for 
public  honesty  and  the  welfare  of  those 


with  whom  they  are  to  co-operate  or  to 
deal,  ought  to  be  recognized  as  an  impor- 
tant and  legitimate  incentive  to  effort.  It 
might  be  said  that  this  is  self-evident,  and 
need  not  be  preached.  There  may  be  no 
necessity  to  preach  it,  but  we  do  desire 
that  it  be  acknowledged  and  accredited 
as  being  worthy  of  admission  within  the 
recognized  code  of  social  ethics.  Themis- 
fortune  has  been  and  ever  is,  as  it  appears 
to  the  writer,  that  the  natural  instincts  of 
self  -  preservation,  physical,  moral,  and 
aesthetic,  are  taken  for  granted  as  being 
self-acting,  and  only  requiring  to  be  re*- 
pressed  ;  they  are  never  raised  within 
the  respectable  company  of  moral  tenets. 
When  they  obtrude  themselves  upon  the 
attention,  their  existence  and  active  power 
being  thus  taken  for  granted,  a  disingen- 
uous attempt  is  ever  being  made  by  well- 
meaning  preachers  and  moralists,  either 
to  ignore  them,  or  to  hasten  by  them  with 
a  sigh  at  the  unfortunate  necessity  of 
their  existence  and  their  claims,  or  to  take 
notice  of  them  only  by  repressing  or  com- 
bating them  where  they  appear  to  assert 
themselves  too  vigorously  or  stand  in  the 


way  of  what  is  considered  more  worthy 
of  endeavor.  We  are  untruthful  to  our- 
selves, and  turn  the  whole  of  conduct  into 
most  harmful  dissonance,  in  thus  ignor- 
ing and  shirking  to  deal  with  the  natural 
instincts  and  desires  for  self-preservation 
and  delectation  as  worthy  to  be  admitted 
into  our  rules  of  conduct ;  whereas  we 
ought  to  train  them  into  their  proper  re- 
lation and  proportion  to  our  more  altruis- 
tic duties,  and  ennoble  them  into  a  virtue 
by  the  countenance  morality  gives  them 
as  one  of  its  tributary  provinces,  instead 
of  degrading  them  to  the  position  of  for- 
eign and  barbarous  regions  outside  the 
boundaries  of  the  land  of  morality,  with 
a  superadded  falsehood  of  the  feigned 
negation  of  their  existence. 

So  in  the  case  of  merchants  and  man- 
ufacturers we  ought  to  dwell  and  insist 
upon  the  just  motive  of  self-preservation 
and  delectation,  but  we  ought  to  add  the 
other  altruistic  duties,  now  barely  recog- 
nized at  all  in  practice,  because  the  really 
active  motive  of  individual  gain  has  been 
absolutely  discountenanced  by  the  high 
moralists,  and  the  people  remain  satisfied 

9 


with  considering  these  vocations  as  out- 
side the  pale  of  the  higher  occupations, 
with  no  laws  whatever  to  govern  them. 

In  the  youthfulness  of  our  moral  awak- 
ening we  seem  inclined  to  exaggerate  the 
claims  of  morality,  as  our  predecessors 
exaggerated  the  claims  of  utility  ;  and  we 
shall  have  to  introduce  into  political  econ- 
omy, as  well  as  into  wider  spheres,  the 
consideration  of  the  playful  and  artistic 
side  of  life,  if  we  wish  to  be  truthful  to 
fact,  and  if  we  would  not  bring  about  the 
impoverishment  and  drought  of  the  chief 
springs  of  an  elevated  human  existence, 
We  shall  have  to  recognize  that  the  ele- 
vating pleasures  and  delights,  physical 
and  intellectual,  in  so  far  as  they  are  not 
essentially  unsocial,  and  destroy  or  stand 
in  the  way  of  common  advancement,  are 
not  only  (and  will  be  for  incalculable 
time)  important  motives  to  human  effort, 
but  ought  to  be  maintained  as  such,  and 
thus  recognized  within  the  province  of  all 
serious  consideration  of  social  matters. 

Nay,  I  would  go  further,  without  wish- 
ing to  discuss  the  fundamental  principles 
of  ethics,  and  maintain  that  the  present 


altruistic  wave  of  humanitarianism  which 
we  can  trace  in  the  lives  of  the  good  peo- 
ple among  us  is  unbalancing  the  lives  of 
these  earnest  people,  and  may  lead  to 
justified  reactions  which  will  retard  sane 
progress.  \Our  duty  to  our  neighbors, 
and  the  duty  of  fully  constituting  our- 
selves as  fit  and  useful  members  of  or- 
ganized communities,  are  insisted  upon  to 
the  exclusion  of  any.  claim  to  self-indul- 
gence, without  any  acknowledgment  of 
a  well-founded  duty  to  self.  And  in  the 
ideal  of  these  earnest  people  we  have  pre- 
sented a  picture  which,  in  its  fantastic 
and  hazy  distortions  of  unrea^ty,  has  a 
profoundly  tragic  element.  It  H  a  world 
in  which  the  centrifugal  efforts  of  good 
men  and  women,  restlessly  active  for  the 
pleasure  and  gratification  of  their  neigh- 
bors, are  directed  into  empty  space,  seek- 
ing for  consistent  bodies  upon  which  they 
are  to  spend  their  beneficent  virtue ;  but 
they  never  reach  them,  because  each  in- 
dividual is  surrounded  by  an  impene- 
trable circle  of  the  same  centrifugal  force 
of  altruism,  and  the  circles  and  forces 
emanating  from  each  personal  centre 


clash  and  absorb  each  other  in  the  vain 
endeavor  at  reaching  the  consistent  cen- 
tre of  a  human  being  that  can  feel  and  be 
delighted,  a'nd  not  only  act  and  distribute 
blessings.  And  meanwhile  the  angels 
that  contemplate  things  human  are  weep- 
ing bitter  tears  at  the  virtuous  folly  of 
their  human  counterparts,  who,  in  the 
emulation  of  angelic  sweetness,  have  mis- 
taken the  shadows  for  the  essence,  be- 
cause of  the  glowing  light  of  goodness 
that  prevails  above  ;  and  the  ugly  little 
gnomes  of  hatred  and  selfishness,  that  dog 
the  steps  of  even  good  men,  are  chuckling 
with  suppressed  titters  of  ironical  laughter 
at  the  general  misery  which  unselfishness 
can  produce.  Surely  we  can  and  ought  - 
to  train,  or  at  least  not  to  ignore  in  false- 
hood, the  more  passive  life  of  man's  soul, 
in  which  we  can  appreciate  and  feel  de- 
light in  the  good  and  great  things  that 
others  provide  for  us,  and  that  we  can 
produce  for  ourselves  and  in  ourselves. 
And  perhaps  this  appeal  may  come  home 
to  the  stern  moralist  if  he  realizes  that 
one  great  virtue,  gratitude,  will  die  of  in- 
anition without  the  grace  of  receiving 


favors  in  this  world,  and  that  pride  is 
likely  to  come  where  gratitude  has  no 
home. 

Ruskin  has  taken  a  great  part  in  bring- 
ing people  to  lead  more  unselfish  lives, 
but  he  has  also  done  much  to  give  this 
one-sided  tendency  to  moral  activity,  es- 
pecially in  his  efforts  to  counteract  the 
idea  of  play  which  happily  still  exists  in 
England.  To  put  it  in  the  form  of  a  ple- 
onasm :  If  play  loses  its  playfulness,  it  has 
lost  its  spirit  and  virtue ;  and  if  playful 
occupation  is  to  be  absorbed  in  the  useful- 
ness of  its  outcome,  its  own  spirit  and  the 
salutary  effect  of  training  and  feeding  the 
passive  side  of  mind  is  destroyed.  The 
idea  of  finding  our  recreation  in  the  pro- 
duction of  some  useful  object  thus  in  it- 
self destroys  the  essence  of  play.  Rus- 
kin's  opposition  to  the  athletic  pastimes 
and  sports  of  England  can  be  accounted 
for  more  readily  in  his  own  education 
than  it  can  be  justified  in  its  effect.  We 
do  not  mean  to  maintain  that  there  are  not 
many  forms  of  it  that  in  themselves  are 
degrading  in  their  influence,  many  that 
are  unsocial  in  character,  many,  though 


good  in  themselves,  that  have  acciden- 
tally developed  into  forms  that  under- 
mine the  moral  health  of  the  nation  ;  and 
against  these  it  is  right  that  good  men 
should  bring  their  influence  to  bear.  But 
in  themselves  they  are  one  of  the  heir- 
looms which  the  Englishmen  of  old  have 
handed  down  to  their  children,  though 
in  many  cases,  from  the  excjusiveness  of 
the  love  bestowed  upon  them,  they  led  to 
a  more  or  less  brutal  form  of  life.  And 
this  heirloom  ought  to  be  cherished  and 
purified  rather  than  impoverished  and 
destroyed.  And  if  we  examine  into  the 
judgments  of  Ruskin  and  similar  writers 
on  these  matters,  we  shall  find  that  they 
have  their  own  forms  (though  they  may 
be  few)  of  play,  in  which  they  would  in- 
dulge and  have  others  indulge,  and  that 
ultimately  it  depends  upon  their  personal 
predilections  upon  which  form  they  would 
put  the  signet  of  their  moral  approbation. 
You  will  find  some,  whose  physical  vital- 
ity is  low  by  nature  or  education  (or  its 
want),  who  would  only  admit  spiritual  en- 
joyments within  the  rightful  recreations 
of  men  and  women.  Others  look  with 


extreme  and  self-satisfied  displeasure  and 
disapproval  upon  him  who  expends  some 
of  his  time  and  substance  upon  the  adorn- 
ment of  his  person  in  the  way  of  clothes 
that  correspond  to  the  modern  standard 
of  taste,  and  not  to  that  of  the  ancient 
Greek,  mediaeval  Frank,  or  the  Norwegian 
Viking,  whose  dress  he  would  like  to  re- 
vive ;  while  they  would  feel  justified  in 
expending  the  same  time  and  substance 
upon  the  binding  of  their  books  (apart 
from  their  contents)  or  upon  the  choice 
of  their  dinner-service.  It  is  no  doubt 
desirable  to  encourage  good  book-binders, 
but  why  not  good  tailors  ?  Others,  again, 
will  rightly  expend  considerable  sums 
upon  their  pictures  and  other  works  of 
art,  yet  will  disapprove  of  the  expenditure 
devoted  to  the  acquisition  of  beautiful 
horses.  They  do  not  recognize  the  legit- 
imate pleasure  to  be  derived  from  the 
sight  as  well  as  the  use  of  an  animal,  and 
as  far  as  their  action  is  concerned  they 
would  make  the  world  the  poorer  by  the 
extirpation  of  one  of  its  most  beautiful 
creations. 

Perhaps  it  would  be  wise  and  just  if 


136 


moralists,  economists,  social  reformers, 
and  political  philosophers,  of  whatever 
shade  of  opinion,  would  write  in  a  con- 
spicuous place  in  their  studies  the  monk's 
memento  mori :  "  Do  not  make  the  world 
poorer,  materially,  intellectually,  moral- 
ly, and  artistically,  by  anything  your 
writings  or  preachings  may  lead  men  to 
do."  And  much  of  the  wholesale  con- 
demnation of  whole  spheres  of  life  and 
activity,  in  which  one  side  or  aspect  has, 
from  one  point  of  view,  been  recognized 
to  be  bad,  may  be  checked  before  it  is 
hurled  into  the  market-place. 

A  harmful  outcome  of  the  efforts,  part- 
ly justified,  of  all  such  moralists  as  Rus- 
kin  and  Carlyle  in  the  England  of  to-day 
has  been  the  stereotyping  of  differences 
in  various  sections  of  the  social  commu- 
nity. Among  these  I  would  except  the 
most  moderate  and  right-minded  social 
reformer  of  the  day,  Matthew  Arnold, 
whose  influence  must  be,  as  it  has  been, 
ultimately  for  the  world's  good.  They 
have  created  a  marked  antithesis  between 
on  the  one  side,  a  class  of  people  who  are 
supposed  (or  sometimes  only  suppose 


themselves)  to  have  serious  and  engross- 
ing moral  aims  in  existence,  and,  on  the 
other,  those  who  apparently  are  carried 
on  in  the  broad  current  of  ordinary  life 
without  any  consciousness,  or  at  least  any 
assertion,  of  higher  social  duties  and 
moral  ideals.  The  result  is  the  creation 
of  not  only  an  unnatural  and  unjustifiable 
gulf  between  these  two  sections,  which 
counteracts  a  proper  fusion  and  mutual 
influencing  of  their  currents,  but  it  has 
led  to  a  mutual  contempt  for  one  another, 
implying  much  self-glorification  on  either 
side,  and  it  has  confirmed  and  hardened 
each  of  the  two  sections  in  the  peculiar 
vices  and  shortcomings  to  which  it  is 
prone.  The  thoughtless  or  fashionable 
man  retaliates  the  moral  haughtiness  of 
the  world-reformer  by  the  assertion  of  his 
superiority  in  his  own  domain,  expressed 
either  by  a  vain  contempt  or  at  least  ap- 
athetic desistence  from  intercourse ;  and 
he  is  met  in  the  same  way  by  the  votaries 
of  the  other  section.  Occasionally  it  may 
happen  that  the  extremist  on  the  worldly 
side  finds  that  his  social  opposite  is  not 
entirely  devoid  of  sympathy  with  and  ca- 


pacity  for  the  life  which  he  considers  a 
desirable  one ;  while  the  world-reformer 
may  realize  that  his  fashionable  friend  is 
neither  a  fool  nor  a  bad  man,  and  has 
often  thought,  and  acted  up  to  his 
thoughts,  upon  the  problems  and  duties 
of  our  life. 

It  thus  appears  to  me  that  the  real  nat- 
ure of  recreation  and  its  position  in  a 
well-regulated  life  has  not  been  properly 
conceived  by  Ruskin,  and  it  is,  I  believe, 
owing  to  this  want  that  he  and  other  so- 
cial reformers  have  somewhat  overstated 
the  abuses  inherent  in  the  occupation  of 
the  modern  factory  hand.  .  It  is  to  be 
found  in  the  powerful  invective  against 
the  thought-killing  work  of  the  mass  of 
our  laboring  classes  —  work  in  which 
there  is  food  for  neither  their  intellectual 
nor  moral  qualities.  "You  must  either 
make  a  tool  of  the  creature  or  a  man  of 
him,"  he  says ;  "  you  cannot  make  both. 
Men  were  not  intended  to  work  with  the 
accuracy  of  tools,  to  be  precise  and  per- 
fect in  all  their  actions.  If  you  will  have 
that  precision  out  of  them,  and  make  their 
fingers  measure  degrees  like  cog-wheels, 


and  their  arms  strike  curves  like  compass- 
es, you  must  inhumanize  them.  All  the 
energy  of  their  spirit  must  be  given  to 
make  cogs  and  compasses  of  themselves. 
All  their  attention  and  strength  must  go 
to  the  accomplishment  of  the  mean  act. 
The  eye  of  the  soul  must  be  bent  upon  the 
finger-point,  and  the  soul's  force  must 
feel  all  the  invisible  nerves  that  guide  it, 
ten  hours  a  day,  that  it  may  not  err  from 
its  steady  precision,  and  so  soul  and  sight 
be  worn  away,  and  the  whole  human  be- 
ing be  lost  at  last — a  heap  of  sawdust,  so 
far  as  its  intellectual  work  in  the  world  is 
concerned  ;  saved  only  by  its  heart,  which 
cannot  go  into  the  forms  of  cogs  and  com- 
passes, but  extends,  after  the  ten  hours 
are  over,  into  fireside  humanity.  ...  It  is 
verily  this  degradation  of  the  operative 
into  the  machine  which  more  than  any 
other  evil  of  the  times  is  leading  the  mass 
of  the  nations  everywhere  into  vain,  inco- 
herent destruction,  struggling  for  a  free- 
dom of  which  they  cannot  explain  the  nat- 
ure to  themselves.  ...  It  is  not  that  men 
are  ill-fed,  but  that  they  have  no  pleasure 
in  the  work  by  which  they  make  their 


bread,  and  therefore  look  to  wealth  as  the 
only  means  of  pleasure.  .  .  .  We  have 
much  studied  and  much  perfected  of  late 
the  civilized  invention  of  the  division  of 
labor,  only  we  give  it  a  false  name.  It  is 
not,  truly  speaking,  the  labor  that  is  di- 
vided, but  the  men — divided  into  mere 
segments  of  men — broken  into  small  frag- 
ments and  crumbs  of  life  ;'  so  that  the  lit- 
tle piece  of  intelligence  that  is  left  in  a 
man  is  not  enough  to  make  a  pin  or  a 
nail,  but  exhausts  itself  in  making  the 
point  of  a  pin  or  the  head  of  a  nail.  Now 
it  is  a  good  and'desirable  thing,  truly,  to 
make  many  pins  in  a  day ;  but  if  we  could 
only  see  with  what  crystal  sand  their 
points  were  polished  —  sand  of  human 
soul,  which  has  to  be  magnified  before 
it  can  be  discerned  for  what  it  is— we 
should  think  there  might  be  some  loss  in 
it  also.  And  the  great  cry  that  rises  from 
all  our  manufacturing  cities,  louder  than 
their  furnace  blast,  is  all  in  very  deed  for 
this  —  that  we  manufacture  everything 
there  except  men." 

And  this  misery,  he  says,  can  only  be 
met  "  by  a  right  understanding  on  the 


part  of  all  classes  of  what  kinds  of  labor 
are  good  for  men,  raising  them  and  mak- 
ing them  happy,  by  a  determined  sacri- 
fice of  ^such  convenience  or  beauty  or 
cheapness  as  is  to  be  got  only  by  the 
degradation  of  the  workmen,  and  by 
equally  determined  demand  for  the  prog- 
ress and  results  of  healthy  and  ennobling 
labor." 

Now  noble  as  is  this  appeal  to  our  con- 
sideration of  the  dignity  and  happiness  of 
our  fellow-men,  and  desirable  as  it  may 
be  that  we  should  ever  bear  these  duties 
in  mind,  I  believe  that  there  is  much  beg- 
ging of  the  main  question  in  these  elo- 
quent words,  which  may  finally  result  in 
fatal  conclusions.  The  one  important 
question  that  will  have  to  be  considered 
carefully,  and  cannot  be  met  by  rhetoric, 
is  the  conception  of  ennobling  and  de- 
grading work.  In  itself  the  attempt  at 
acquiring  "  the  accuracy  of  tools,  to  be 
precise  and  perfect  in  all  their  actions," 
is  not  degrading,  however  unattainable  it 
may  be ;  nor  is  it  a  "  mean  act  "  in  itself 
"  to  bend  the  eye  of  the  soul  upon  the 
finger-point,  and  the  soul's  force  feel  all 


the  invisible  nerves  that  guide  it,  that  it 
may  not  err  from  its  steady  precision." 
The  true  point  perhaps  really  lies  in  the 
"  ten  hours  a  day  "  of  such  occupation. 
It  is  a  question  of  degree,  not  of  kind. 
And  if  the  amount  of  such  work  is  dele- 
terious to  body  and  mind,  it  is  against  it 
that  the  crusade  ought  to  be  waged.  Nor 
is  there  anything  especially  degrading  in 
the  division  of  labor,  if  it  also  tends  to 
encourage,  or  at  least  not  to  destroy,  the 
possibility  of  the  desirable  division  of 
man's  conscious  life  into  work  and  posi- 
tive effort  and  relaxation  from  wrork  and 
more  passive  recreation.  It  is  practically 
impossible,  and  perhaps  ideally  undesira- 
ble, that  work  should  be  completely  puri- 
fied from  the  element  of  constraint  and 
continuous  effort  which  distinguishes  it 
from  play.  Its  real  spiritual  vitality  and 
ennobling  incentive  will  ever  be  forth- 
coming in  the  consciousness  that  the 
immediate  results  of  the  effort  meet  the 
need  of  society.  Now  if  we  are  justified 
in  believing,  as  Ruskin  does,  that "  it  is  a 
good  and  desirable  thing  truly  to  make 
many  pins  in  a  day,"  this  consciousness 


ought  to  prevent  the  laborer's  moral  effort 
from  tending  towards  his  own  degrada- 
tion. Nay,  the  subjugation  and  disci- 
pline of  his  own  faculties  and  instincts 
for  unbounded  freedom  would  ever  be  a 
type  to  him  of  the  great  and  inspiriting 
law  which  holds  a  perfectly  organized  so- 
ciety together,  always  provided  that  the 
duration  of  this  effort  does  not  exceed  the 
limits  of  the  proper  conditions  of  phys- 
ical and  moral  health,  and  that  time  and 
opportunities  for  the  culture  of  the  rec- 
reative side  of  his  existence  are  offered. 
There  is  hardly  any  occupation  seriously 
carried  on  which  we  can  at  present  con- 
ceive of,  that  does  not  necessarily  carry 
with  it  that  which  in  plain  words  is  called 
drudgery.  The  writer  has  known  stu- 
dents and  literary  men  who,  in  choosing 
avocation,  preferred  to  the  immediate 
profession  representative  of  their  favorite 
studies  the  drudgery  of  an  office  in  the 
civil  service,  where  their  business  chiefly 
consisted  in  adding  up  or  controlling  the 
additions  of  the  small  salaries  of  soldiers 
and  officers  in  the  army  and  navy.  But 
it  may  be  added  that  this  their  daily 


pursuit,  which  at  no  too  great  cost  gave 
them  the  feeling  of  having  done  their  le- 
gitimate day's  work,  and  furnished  the 
grateful  prospect  of  subsequently  prose- 
cuting their  favorite  studies,  was  not  too 
long  in  duration  of  time  ;  and  I  may  add 
that  it  was  the  very  mechanism  and 
thoughtlessness  of  their  occupation  which 
constituted  one  element  of  their  prefer- 
ence. 

Without  wishing  to  deny  the  existence 
of  much  misery  and  of  much  that  is 
wrong  among  the  factory  hands,  or  the 
general  desirability  of  making  work  as 
interesting  as  its  efficient  production  will 
admit,  it  appears  to  me  that  the  main- 
spring of  Ruskin's  opposition  to  factory 
work  lies  in  his  opposition  to  the  mechan- 
ical production,  more  especially  steam- 
manufactured  goods.  Let  us  at  once 
touch  and  meet  the  central  doctrine  by 
stating  a  proposition  which  may,  to 
many,  appear  as  evident  as  it  undoubt- 
edly is  directly  opposed  to  the  chief  views 
expressed  or  implied  in  most  of  the  writ- 
ings of  Ruskin  and  his  allies  and  his  dis- 
ciples, namely :  that  if  the  best  is  good, 


the  second  best  is  not  necessarily  bad ;  ( 
and  that  if  the  production  of  the  best  is/ 
in  every  way  to  be  encouraged,  this  en- 
couragement does  not  necessarily  absorb 
or  exclude  the  desirability  of  fostering 
the  production  of  the  second  best,  which  is 
not  to  be  confounded  with  the  second  rate. 
If  a  bronze  repousse  or  chased  casket  the 
making  of  which  took  an  artist-craftsman 
five  years  of  his  most  skilled  labor  could 
only  be  bought  by  a  petty  prince  four  hun- 
dred years  ago,  and  to-day  perhaps  only 
by  a  national  museum,  then  let  this  cas- 
ket be  made,  and  be  made  as  well  as 
human  hands  guided  by  an  inspired  im- 
agination can  make  it.  But  if,  by  the  gal- 
vano-plastic  process,  and  by  calling  in  the 
aid  of  steam  machinery,  this  masterpiece 
can  be  reproduced  at  a  trifling  cost,  so 
that,  where  only  the  princeling  could  pos- 
sess such  a  work  four  hundred  years  ago, 
in  hundreds  of  humble  households  the  re- 
productions could  adorn  the  room  or  sanc- 
tify use  by  beauty,  there  can  but  be  much 
gain  in  every  direction.  And  even  if  the 
lines  be  not  quite  as  precise  and  sharp  in 
the  reproductions  as  they  are  in  the  origi- 


i46 


nal,  and  the  work  is  thus  not  best,*  the 
best  still  exists  in  the  original,  and  what 
so  closely  approaches  it  can  only  be  el- 
evating to  the  artistic  taste  of  humble 
people  when  constantly  before  their  eyes  ; 
and  the  universal  growth  of  public  appre- 
ciation, needs,  and  demands  in  this  direc- 
tion, arising  out  of  the  distribution  of  such 
second-best  gems,  will  naturally  lead  to  the 
increased  demand  for  the  best  originals. 
Let  us  suppose  (which  is  hardly  conceiva- 
ble) that  the  advance  of  mechanical  skill 
should  enable  us  to  dispense  entirely  with 
human  intelligent  work,  then  it  will  be 
right  for  such  human  activity  to  become 
an  interesting  matter  of  historical  contem- 
plation and  study,  and  this,  to  all  but  ro- 
manticists, will  justly  be  considered  as  a 
blessing.  No  healthy  mind  really  con- 
cerned about  the  welfare  of  humanity  need 
ever  be  appalled  at  the  Promethean  ad- 

*  The  price  and  limited  editions  of  Raskin's  books 
have,  in  spite  of  all  he  may  say,  appeared  to  me  a  grave 
contradiction,  which  is,  however,  to  be  accounted  for  by 
the  fallacious  reasoning  here  pointed  out.  The  adver- 
tisement of  limited  editions  of  books  and  engravings,  ap- 
pear to  me  to  mark  an  appeal  to  one  of  the  most  unso- 
cial, and  thus  immoral,  instincts  of  modern  society. 


vance  in  human  skill.  The  reasoning  of 
many  of  these  Ruskinians,  earnest  men  or 
shallow  exquisites,  in  this  half-moral,  half- 
aesthetic  realm,  is  misleading  and  insid- 
ious, because  of  the  accompanying  flavor 
of  high  morality  and  refinement.  So,  for 
instance,  I  have  heard  the  antique  system 
of  casting  bronze,  known  as  a  cire  perdu, 
in  which  a  mishap  in  the  casting  would 
destroy  the  wax  model,  and  with  it  all  the 
beauty,  the  result  of  so  much  inspired 
effort,  commended  as  manifesting  the 
high  artistic  earnestness  and  enthusiasm 
of  the  artists  of  old,  as  contrasted  with 
the  mercenary  timidity  or  cowardice  of 
modern  artists,  who,  at  best,  would  adopt 
means,  while  using  the  wax  model,  to  as- 
sure the  possibility  of  its  reproduction. 
There  was  not  only  praise  for  the  artistic 
enthusiasm  of  the  artist  of  old,  but  blame 
to  the  modern  artist  for  his  desire  to  ob- 
viate, if  possible,  the  absolute  loss  of  his 
model.  This  is  one  of  the  worst  forms 
of  practical  romanticism.  Now  if  this 
process  of  casting  a  cire  perdu  does  pro- 
duce a  more  beautiful  surface  in  the 
bronze  work  than  any  other  form  (which 


i48 


it  does),  we  ought  by  all  means  to  possess 
such  works,  and  to  revive  the  process. 
But  the  loss  of  a  beautiful  statue  by  Dona- 
tello  or  Cellini  is  a  loss  to  the  world  ;  and 
it  is  an  unsocial  feeling  which  leads  us  to 
admire  less  an  artist  who  will  strive  to 
discover,  or  will  be  gratified  at  the  dis- 
covery of,  some  means  of  avoiding  the 
complete  destruction  of  hi$  ideas  and  la- 
bor as  materialized  in  his  model.  The 
perfecting  and  cheapening  of  reproduc- 
tive art,  whether  good  hand-made  or  me- 
chanical copies,  will  invariably  tend  tow- 
ards the  increase  for  the  demand  of  the 
original  artist's  work  in  every  direction. 
There  is  at  bottom  an  unsocial  element 
in  this  whole  class  of  feelings  among  these 
exquisites  ;  it  is  artistic  pharisaism.  The 
main  enemy  in  Ruskin's  warfare  against 
modern  industry  is  the  steam-engine. 
And  it  is  here  that  his  romanticism  and 
the  unconscious  workings  of  an  unsocial 
exclusiveness  are  the  main  motive  powers 
to  his  opposition.  How  much,  from  an 
economical  point  of  view,  there  may  be 
of  truth  in  his  idea  that  it  would  be  best, 
after  using  human  hands,  to  exhaust  nat- 


ure's  power  of  wind  and  water,  and  only 
in  the  utmost  extremity,  after  these  have 
been  properly  used,  to  turn  to  more  arti- 
ficial aids,  I  am  unable  to  judge.  But  we 
cannot  help  feeling  that  in  his  absolute 
condemnation  of  the  factory  and  railway 
there  is  a  strong  element  of  romanticism, 
which  on  the  one  hand  wilfully  blinds 
its  vision  against  the  good  that  lies  in  one 
great  side  of  actual  modern  life,  while  it 
is  longingly  directed  towards  a  past  which 
to  the  people  living  in  those  ages  was  un- 
doubtedly fraught  with  great  evils  and 
miseries,  and  which  probably  never  ex- 
isted as  depicted  by  the  romanticist.  The 
constant  juxtaposition  of  the  life  of  the 
Swiss  or  the  Tyrolese  peasant  with  the 
English  farmer  or  laborer,  giving  rise  to 
a  comparison  in  his  words  so  much  to  the 
detriment  of  the  physical  and  spiritual 
welfare  of  the  modern  toiler,  strikes  us  as 
being  as  far  removed  from  the  reality  of 
things  as  many  romantic  descriptions  in 
old-fashioned  novels  of  the  happiness  of 
the  rural  life  of  old,  or  the  depiction,  or 
rather  costume  -  painting,  of  the  "  Salon 
Tyroler"  is  removed  from  truth.  Hap- 


piness  and  simplicity,  if  they  really  did 
or  do  exist  in  these  regions,  may  be  con- 
founded with  animal  restriction  of  wants 
and  brutal  limitation  of  the  means  of  sat- 
isfying them.  And  it  is  well  for  us  care- 
fully to  question  ourselves,  when  we  com- 
plain of  the  loss  of  picturesqueness  which 
modern  improvements  bring  in  their  train  t 
whether  unconsciously  we  are  not  speak- 
ing from  gross  selfishness,  in  which  the 
lives  and  happiness  of  living  human  be- 
ings are  looked  upon  by  us,  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  our  intellectual  or  artistic 
refinement,  as  scenes  over  which  we  smack 
our  lips  as  if  we  were  reading  a  book  or 
seeing  a  play.  And  as  it  is  with  the  com- 
parison of  lives,  so  it  may  also  be  with 
the  comparison  of  institutions  and  things. 
The  preference  which  is  given  to  the 
windmill  over  the  factory  chimney  may, 
to  a  great  extent,  be  purely  romantic.  We 
can  conceive  of  a  romantic  knight  some 
centuries  ago  issuing  from  his  castle  gate 
and  complaining  of  the  disfigurement  to 
the  good  scene  of  old  caused  by  the  sug- 
gestive structure  with  outspread  wings 
cutting  the  horizon  line  that  bounded  his 


vast  domain,  as  centuries  hence  we  can 
conceive  of  another  romanticist  who,  long- 
ing with  praise  for  the  restoration  of  the 
good  old  factory  chimneys,  complains  of 
the  new  structures  erected  to  meet  the 
new  wants  of  an  advancing  civilization. 
The  factory  chimney  is  in  itself,  apart 
from  romantic  associations,  not  necessa- 
rily more  unbeautiful  in  line  than  the 
windmill,  and  there  is  no  "reason  why  its 
form  should  not  be  still  more  improved. 
There  is  a  truth  strongly  put  by  Ruskin 
for  which  he  would  have  gained  more 
universal  recognition  if  the  statements  of 
it  had  been  more  moderate  and  in  con- 
formity with  fact,  namely,  the  duty  of 
maintaining  the  land  which  we  inhabit  in 
the  conditions  conducive  to  health,  and 
with  the  careful  guarding  and  preserva- 
tion of  the  natural  and  historical  beauties, 
which  are,  to  omit  all  their  spiritual  qual- 
ifications, real  national  possessions  of  the 
highest  economical  value.  To  allow  the 
smoke  from  the  chimneys  to  turn  pure 
air  into  pestilential  miasmata,  to  see  beau- 
tiful Ireams  and  rivers  defiled,  to  witness 
the  most  lovely  and  unique  scenes  ruth- 


lessly  robbed  of  their  chief  charms  of  nat- 
ural beauty  —  these  are  losses  which,  if 
they  do  bear  comparison  with  actual  in- 
dustrial loss  to  individual  members  or 
groups  of  the  community,  will  outweigh 
them  heavily.  The  day  may  come  when 
one  of  the  most  important  functions  of 
the  government  concerned  with  the  in- 
ternal affairs  of  a  nation  will  be  to  secure 
and  guard  the  public  lands  for  the  pur- 
poses of  national  health  and  of  national 
delectation. 

But  when  Ruskin  complains  that  the 
delightful  silence  which  reigned  in  some 
rural  districts  is  now  disturbed  by  the  life 
of  industry,  and  that  portions  of  Switzer- 
land, which  he  and  other  kindred  spirits 
could  once  enjoy  in  comparative  seclu- 
sion are  vulgarized  by  numbers  of  unedu- 
cated tourists  ;  when  he  complains  of  the 
very  facility  of  approach  to  many  of  these 
sacred  haunts  brought  about  by  the  rail- 
ways, and  the  picnics  which  do  not  agree 
with  the  exquisite  musings  of  the  solitary 
votary  of  nature,  we  cannot  help  feeling 
that  this  arises  not  only  from  a  romantic 
but  from  an  essentially  unsocial  spirit. 


153 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  our  enjoy- 
ment must  be  impaired  by  the  reduction 
of  what  stimulates  our  highest  emotions 
to  a  commonplace ;  but  we  must  willing- 
ly make  this  sacrifice  when  we  consider 
the  great  gain  accruing  to  hundreds  or 
thousands  where  before  it  but  reached 
units. 

At  bottom  it  is  one  and  the  same  spirit 
of  exclusiveness  and  exquisiteness  which 
we  before  traced  as  influencing  his  views 
on  other  social  and  economical  matters, 
and  which  we  can  trace  at  once  in  the 
intensity  of  admiration  and  the  violence 
of  denunciation  in  matters  of  art.  And 
when  in  his  followers,  or  in  those  influ- 
enced by  him,  this  is  coupled  with  dog- 
matism, we  can  see  how  this  leads  to  the 
formation  of  a  group  of  people  whose 
belief  in  their  own  infallibility  of  taste 
and  judgment  is  in  potency  only  equalled 
by  the  narrowness  of  their  vision.  They 
believe  and  hold  that  they  have  found 
the  true  ideals  of  life,  and  that  all  others 
are  idolatrous ;  that  they  possess  the  true 
touchstone  of  taste,  and  only  admire  what 
is  best,  and  that  all  else  is  bad  or  vulgar. 


And  the  worst  is  that  apparent  intensity 
of  feeling  does  not  always  insure  absolute 
sincerity  of  conviction ;  nay,  that  an  un- 
balanced mind  devoid  of  moderation  is 
likely  to  mar  the  trueness  of  its  own 
scales  of  veracity.  And  out  of  these  con- 
scious exquisites  of  mind  and  their  ensu- 
ing opposition  to  the  current  of  ordinary 
life  there  will  naturally  ariose  the  desire 
and  the  habit  of  manifesting  distinctions 
in  outer  appearance  and  conduct ;  and  it 
is  thus  that  it  may  be  in  great  part  ow- 
ing to  this  influence  that  the  movement 
which  in  its  best  sides  has  been  produc- 
tive of  much  good,  but  which  has  natural- 
ly and  rapidly  degenerated  into  the  in- 
sincere forms  that  happily  are  dying  the 
death  of  innocent  ridicule,  the  movement 
the  votaries  of  which  have  been  called 
cesthetes,  has  come  to  life.  Though  at  the 
beginning  of  this  paper  attention  was 
drawn  to  the  fact  that  it  wras  one  of  the 
great  merits  of  Ruskin  to  have  success- 
fully waged  war  against  Bohemianism 
among  the  artist  community,  his  influ- 
ence has  tended  to  produce  a  far  less 
repulsive  and  obnoxious  form  of  Bohe- 


155 


mianism.  This  is  a  very  curious  phe- 
nomenon. For  the  essential  characteris- 
tic of  Bohemianism  (and  in  this  it  is 
related  to  romanticism)  has  ever  been 
negative,  namely,  its  protest  against  ex- 
isting ideals  as  manifested  in  the  current 
habits  of  life  among  the  ruling  majority. 
Now  it  depends  very  much  upon  the 
nature  of  the  ideals  and  customs  of  this 
ruling  majority  what  form  the  Bohemian- 
ism  of  the  day  will  take.  The  Philistine 
of  the  German  student,  and  that  of  the 
dishevelled  gentleman  of  the  Latin  Quar- 
ter, and  that  of  the  modern  aesthete,  are 
all  very  different  people — nay,  sometimes 
they  are  diametrically  opposed  to  one  an- 
other. The  modern  English  Bohemian 
may  be  the  Philistine  pur  sang  in  the  es- 
timation of  the  Bohemian  of  Heidelberg, 
or  of  the  streets  abutting  on  the  Paris 
Pantheon.  From  a  positive  point  of 
view  he  certainly  has  a  more  moral  or 
artistic  origin  in  his  opposition  to  the 
Philistine.  There  are  three  shadings 
which  we  can  distinguish  among  them, 
all  more  or  less  degenerated  practical 
caricatures  of  the  theories  of  their  intel- 


i56 


lectual  parents.  The  first,  deriving  its 
intellectual  stimulus  from  Matthew  Ar- 
nold, is  more  closely  related  in  its  antipa- 
thies to  the  Continental  prototype,  espe- 
cially that  of  Germany,  inasmuch  as  the 
Philistine  here  marks  an  uncultured  bour- 
geois, or  the  unintellectual  country  squire. 
The  second,  arising  out  of  Carlyle,  is  the 
anti-Belgravian  Bohemianism,  and  is  more 
directly  opposed  to  the  gilt  world  of  fash- 
ion. And  the  third,  the  Ruskinian  form, 
comprising  elements  of  both  the  previous 
bodies,  is  anti-athletic,  and  draws  its  visi- 
ble inspirations  chiefly  from  the  pictu- 
resque side  of  art.  The  great  good  as 
incentives  that  these  extreme  movements 
were  capable  of  doing,  they  have  perhaps 
already  done,  and  the  desirable  part  of 
their  vitality  has  probably  spent  itself. 
Every  Bohemian  movement  has  the  germs 
of  decay  in  itself,  because  of  its  essentially 
negative  nature.  Very  soon  the  ideals,  in 
so  far  as  they  were  positive,  lose  consis- 
tency ;  and  only  the  dissenting  forms  re- 
main. The  mass  of  this  community  gen- 
erally groups  round  some  originator  who 
dissents  from  strong  inner  motives  ;  but 


157 

these  motives  have  not  their  root  in  the 
inner  life  of  the  followers,  who  tend  tow- 
ards formal  exaggeration.  And  further- 
more, the  conventionality  to  which  they 
oppose  themselves  has  one  strong  central 
support,  the  very  obtrusion  of  which  the 
Bohemian  struggles  against,  namely,  its 
laws ;  while  the  opponents,  on  the  other 
hand,  have  not  this  to  sustain  them,  and 
thus  readily  run  riot.  An  analogous  case 
is  presented  in  the  history  of  some  relig- 
ious sects  of  which  the  founder  may  have 
been  a  fervent  mystic ;  but  the  sect,  as 
such,  has  often  degenerated  into  weak- 
ness, and  becomes  a  malignant  excres- 
cency  when  constituted  into  an  organized 
body,  making  a  rite  and  convention  of 
the  very  unconventionality  of  its  spirit- 
ual founder,  and  the  mystical  fervor  has 
often  degenerated  into  a  frenzied  luxuri- 
ous dissipation,  leading  to  the  very  oppo- 
site extreme  of  the  spirit  which  moved 
the  leader.  So  here  it  would  not  be  as- 
tonishing if  sestheticism  were  gradually 
to  degenerate  into  a  form  of  coarseness, 
the  very  opposite  of  its  refined  origin. 


The  possible  danger  of  Ruskin's  influ- 
ence, to  which  reference  has  just  been 
made,  far  removed  from  the  intended  pur- 
port of  his  books,  is  not  counteracted  by 
a  prominent  tone  of  sobriety  in  his  own 
works ;  nay,  it  is  here  that  the  dogmatic 
exquisite  will  find  many  instances  of  a 
prevailing  spirit  of  narrow  dogmatism. 
But  in  the  life  of  this  great  man  it  can 
be  accounted  for  and  morally  justified, 
which  cannot  be  said  of  the  unintelligent 
followers.  It  is  the  result  of  a  life  too 
much  shut  up  in  itself,  and  not  sobered 
down  by  the  constraint  of  fixed  disci- 
pline, and  widened  out  by  continuous 
intercourse  with  people  of  equal  calibre 
following  different  pursuits,  and  not  nec- 
essarily responsive  to  his  own  views.  It 
is  a  mind  too  much  concerned  with  its 
own  substance,  revolving  too  much  round 
one  centre,  and  reflecting  too  much  its 
own  inner  lights,  rather  than  the  di- 
rect lights  from  without.  No  doubt  in 
his  autobiography  and  in  his  works  he 
dwells  upon  himself  with  an  apparent  im- 
partiality most  remarkable,  and  in  so  far 
unselfish;  but  still  it  is  never  free  from 


egotism,  and  may  be  the  height  of  it.  He 
almost  smacks  his  lips  over  himself  as  a 
thing  to  be  studied,  and  appears  at  times 
touchingly  humble  and  modest;  but  he 
is,  after  all,  constantly  busied  about  him- 
self, and  cannot  forget  it  for  work  or  in 
work.  This  is  not  only  the  case  in  Prcc- 
terzta,  or  to  be  noticed  in  the  introduc- 
tion of  biographical  matter  into  the  Fors 
and  many  other  of  his  writings,  but 
smaller  side  lights  show  the  same  failing  : 
as  when  he  thinks  it  worth  printing  that 
a  poem  was  written  on  New- Year's  Day, 
1828,  in  the  Queen  of  the  Air ;  when  he 
thinks  it  proper  to  remark  that  he  has  a 
finer  appreciation  of  nature  than  most 
people.  His  proffering  remarks  as  to  the 
extent  he  has  worked  upon  a  subject,  how 
convinced  he  is  of  the  truth,  or  the  weight 
it  has  or  ought  to  have,  and  the  degree 
of  earnest  consideration  it  deserves — in 
short,  the  frequent  mention  of  "  I  "  where 
it  should  be  "  it  " — all  this  is  the  result  of 
a  mind  which,  shut  up  in  itself,  drops  into 
a  kind  of  intellectual  provincialism. 

This  exaggeration  of  the  importance  of 
one's  own  thoughts  is  often  due  to  the 


neglect  of  reading  what  others  have  writ- 
ten on  the  very  subject  of  our  thoughts. 
Now  a  doubt  must  often  have  come  to  the 
original  student  or  writer  as  to  whether  it 
can  be  of  much  advantage,  if  he  has  any- 
thing to  say,  to  spend  much  time  in  see- 
ing how  others  have  said  it,  and  to  quote 
their  views  and  encumber  his  own  with 
foot-notes  and  the  other  customary  forms 
that  characterize  a  scholar's  work.  It 
may  perhaps  be  better  at  times  to  work 
straight  on  and  write  what  one  has  to  say, 
for  fear  of  otherwise  never  writing  at  all. 
Still  it  will  be  found  that  the  student  be- 
comes wider  in  following  this  old  plan, 
and  generally  without  the  loss  of  origi- 
nality ;  he  becomes  maturer,  clearer,  and 
more  condensed.  Besides  this,  there  is 
the  question  of  honesty  and  moral  regard 
for  previous  work  ;  for  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  general  progress  would  be  re- 
tarded if  each  student  and  writer  would 
have  to  begin  anew,  and  not  consider  the 
successful  efforts  of  previous  generations 
and  individuals.  And  I  venture  to  think 
that  if  Ruskin  had  followed  this  more, 
and  had  been  more  like  the  German  pro- 


fessor  he  appears  to  despise,  we  should 
not  have  lost  much  of  his  originality, 
while  I  certainly  hold  that  we  should  have 
had  more  system,  more  careful  delibera- 
tion, and  more  moderation.  There  would 
have  been  fewer  instances  of  dilettante- 
ism  in  his  works,  and  the  great  good  that 
is  in  them  would  have  stood  out  clearly, 
undimmed  by  the  hasty  exaggerations  of 
a  fatally  facile  pen  and  the  immoderate- 
ness  of  a  self-indulged  imagination.  But 
this  painful  tendency  towards  eccentric- 
ity, turning  to  habitual,  and  thus  uncon- 
scious, exaggeration  of  mind  and  diction, 
is  often  fostered  by  the  vicious  influence 
of  a  selfish  society,  especially  of  idle  and 
fashionable  dilettanti.  Just  as  (and  here 
with  more  justification,  perhaps)  they 
will  force  a  painter  who  has  successfully 
drawn  one  kind  of  dog  to  paint  nothing 
but  this  dog,  so,  seeing  a  new  and  strik- 
ing side  in  a  literary  man,  they  will, 
urged  by  their  unassuageable  thirst  for 
amusement,  gradually  force  him  to  bring 
out  that  side  in  his  ordinary  intercourse, 
and  thus  turn  originality  into  mannerism, 
into  stereotyped  epigrammatic  exaggera- 


162 


tions,  until  they  may  succeed  in  produc- 
ing the  worst  and  most  tragic  form  of  a 
hypocrite,  namely,  the  unconscious  actor 
of  a  part,  the  dupe  of  a  thumping  insin- 
cere conscientiousness,  of  rude  eccentric- 
ity. The  result  in  many  cases  is  the  loss 
of  dignity  in  many  good  men  of  some 
native  power,  who  are  often  thus  con- 
verted into  serious  jesters  by  the  selfish 
requirements  of  a  thoughtless  society. 
One  of  the  greatest  dangers  to  all  genius 
is  that  of  being  robbed  of  its  vital  strength 
by  velvety-pawed  lion-hunters. 

In  the  case  of  Ruskin,  and  in  the  case 
of  his  master  in  some  departments,  Car- 
lyle,  the  prevalence  of  the  relentless,  ex- 
aggerated, denunciatory  frame  of  mind 
and  form  of  expression  has  often  beguiled 
them  away  from  the  noble  course  of  so- 
ber and  conscientious  search  after  truth, 
absorbing  much  of  the  energies  that  are 
painfully  needed  to  reduce  to  order  the 
tangled  web  of  the  innumerable  facts  ^ 
that  crowd  round  the  narrow  gateways 
of  conclusions  justified  by  truth.  It  has 
kept  them  from  curbing  subjective  im- 
pulses, strong  desires  and  passions  and 


i63 


prejudices,  and  of  bending  their  ener- 
gies to  the  service  of  the  stern-browed 
goddess  ;  it  has  lured  them  on  to  the 
riotous  chase  of  the  maenad  whom  they 
mistake  for  a  muse.  The  prophetic  de- 
nunciatory tone  in  its  resounding  flow 
may  prove  to  be  an  easy  means  of  shirk- 
ing and  avoiding  the  great  task  of  declar- 
ing to  men  the  hard-won  truths  that  are 
announced  in  simple,  diffident,  nay,  halt- 
ing words,  but  still  penetrate  and  endure 
in  their  far-reaching  quality  of  sound. 
And  ultimately  the  result  upon  such  men  t 
themselves,  and  a  baneful  influence  upon 
all  who  come  within  the  circle  of  their  ' 
power,  is  a  general  blunting  of  the  keen 
edge  of  what  we  must  call  intellectual 
morality,  that  moral  and  mental  habit 
which  makes  it  impossible  for  any  man 
to  state  as  an  undoubted  fact  whatever  he 
has  not  conscientiously  tested  and  exam- 
ined in  all  its  bearings. 

There  is  nothing  we  would  plead  for 
more  earnestly  than  moderation  in  mat- 
ters intellectual.  We  are  often  told  that 
exaggeration  is  demanded  to  reach  and 
move  the  masses,  in  order  that  a  general 


UNIVEBSITT 


1 64 


truth  might  become  practically  effectual 
and  leave  the  spheres  of  pure  thought. 
We  are  informed  that  minute  and  careful 
balancing  of  truth  finds  its  place  in  the 
silent  study ;  but  that,  when  we  go  out 
into  the  market-place  and  thoroughfares 
of  actual  life,  we  need  direct  and  forcible 
statements,  figures  of  prophets  and  movers 
of  men  who  stand  out  strongly  as  types 
of  the  one  idea  which  they  incorporate 
— comparative  coarseness  of  intellectual 
fibre  and  passionate  boldness  of  expres- 
sion. Luther  moved  men,  we  are  told, 
not  Melancthon  and  the  humanists.  It 
has  almost  become  a  commonplace  to 
say  :  not  the  sober  student,  but  the  pro- 
phetic enthusiast  is  required  to  effect  great 
changes  in  the  world's  history.  I  will  not 
attempt  here  to  answer  the  question 
whether,  if  we  look  into  history  carefully, 
we  shall  not  find  that,  after  all,  the  mod- 
erate student  was  not  more  efficient  in 
turning  the  world's  current  into  lasting 
and  beneficent  channels  than  the  violent 
enthusiast,  and  that  the  latter  really  only 
became  influential  when  he  made  himself 
the  mouth-piece  of  the  former.  I  should 


further  suggest  the  question  whether  each 
exaggerated  movement  does  not  bring 
with  it  a  corresponding  reaction,  corre- 
sponding in  strength  to  the  degree  of  ex- 
aggeration, and  acting,  in  the  long-run, 
as  a  retarding  force  to  human  progress, 
quite  out  of  proportion  to  any  temporary 
gain  apparent  at  the  time  of  the  exagger- 
ation ?  If  we  must  needs  have  strong 
preaching,  then  there  is  one  topic  for  the 
moralist  and  world-reformer  in  which  ex- 
aggeration is  least  likely  to  be  harmful — 
the  gospel  of  Sanity  and  Moderation. 

Ruskin  has  often  allowed  his  feelings  to 
run  counter  to  the  workings  and  injunc- 
tions of  this  higher  duty.  In  the  preface 
to  the  Seven  Lamps  there  are  "  cases  in 
which  men  feel  too  keenly  to  be  silent,  and 
perhaps  too  strongly  to  be  wrong ;"  he 
ought  to  have  guarded  most  jealously 
against  the  strong  feelings  as  often  making 
it  more  probable  that  we  may  go  wrong. 
The  use  of  superlative  adjectives  condemn- 
ing or  praising,  with  him  and  with  Carlyle, 
points  to  the  samebluntness  of  intellectual 
morality.  One  thing  or  work  is  wholly 
"  bad,"  another  at  once  all  that  is  "  good." 


i66 


He  passes  judgment  not  only  upon  all 
forms  of  art,  but  upon  the  works  of  great 
and  sober  men  of  science,  on  the  problems 
of  these  departments  of  science  them- 
selves, whether  it  be  the  works  of  an 
Agassiz  or  of  a  Darwin,  the  purport  of 
whose  work  he  had  never  trained  himself 
to  realize.  Such  exaggerations  may,  alas, 
from  a  literary  point  of  view  appear  to  be 
innocent,  but  in  their  effect  they  certainly 
are  not.  He  will,  for  instance,  in  Prceterita 
II.,  page  298,  tell  us,  with  the  emphatic 
terms  of  a  convinced  authority,  speaking 
of  Sydney  Smith's  Elementary  Sketches  on 
Moral  Philosophy,  that  "  they  contain  in 
the  simplest  terms  every  final  truth  which 
any  rational  mortal  needs  to  learn  on  this 
subject."  We  must  ask  what  right  his 
reading  of  that  vast  subject  called  philos- 
ophy has  given  him  to  pass  judgment  in 
any  way  upon  it.  And  so,  in  almost  every 
chapter  of  all  his  books,  we  cannot  help 
feeling  that  this  is  a  positive  blemish,  the 
influence  of  which  cannot  be  good ;  and 
we  turn  with  pure  gratitude  to  his  de- 
scriptive passages,  where  there  is  no  scope 
for  this  intellectual  vice,  and  where  the 


i67 


good  that  is  in  him  has  brought  forth  fruit 
that  will  be  the  delight  and  profit  of  all 
the  ages  in  which  the  English  language  is 
read.  If,  as  far  as  intellectual  example  is 
concerned,  we  turn  from  the  prophetic 
and  denunciatory  violence  of  Carlyle  and 
Ruskin  to  the  charitable  and  unselfish 
statement  of  a  great  continuous  effort  in 
a  long  laborious  life,  beautiful  as  it  is  sim- 
ple, we  cannot  help  feeling  that,  besides 
the  results  of  the  actual  research  of 
Charles  Darwin,  his  literary  and  scientific 
example  as  a  writer  can  but  have  a  last- 
ing and  elevating  influence  upon  the  minds 
of  all  those  who  read  him  for  generations 
to  come.  No  amount  of  denunciatory 
sermons  can  replace  the  unconscious 
preaching  contained  within  the  work  and 
its  results  of  the  student  who  has  honestly 
mastered  a  subject,  however  narrow  its 
range.  This  is  the  highest  form  of  preach- 
ing, if  only  for  the  supreme  effect,  the 
suppression  of  impulse  and  passion  for  an 
end  that  has  no  immediate  bearing  upon 
our  own  interests,  and  does  not  flatter 
our  vanity  in  the  elevation  of  our  own 
position  to  that  of  a  direct  teacher  or 


i68 


chastiser  of  foolish  humanity,  and  above 
all  in  the  jealous  custody  and  possible  re- 
finement of  our  feeling  for  truth.*  It  ap- 
pears to  me  one  of  the  greatest  blemishes 
in  the  work  of  men  like  Ruskin  and  Car- 
lyle  that,  however  high  the  position  they 
may  themselves  assign  to  truth  in  their 
moral  scales,  the  actual  tenor  of  their 
work  has  counteracted  rather  than  favor- 
ed this  desirable  consummation.  Bear- 
ing this  in  mind,  we  can  recognize  the 
good  that  is  in  Ruskin's  work,  and  there 
will  be  enough  of  merit  remaining  to 
make  him  one  of  the  great  benefactors  of 
mankind. 

*  The  development  of  this  intellectual  morality  as  a 
habit  in  individuals,  and  as  a  tradition  in  a  nation  and  in 
an  age,  is  intimately  connected  with  practical  morality 
and  truthfulness  ;  and  there  appears  to  me  to  be  a  strong 
moral  and  disciplinary  bearing  in  the  methods  of  research 
as  applied  to  the  natural  sciences  within  our  days,  to 
which  Charles  Darwin  has  chiefly  contributed.  It  is 
true,  the  inductive  method  was  recommended  by  Bacon 
and  insisted  upon  by  Hume  ;  but  it  has  only  become  a 
fact  in  Darwin  ;  and  through  his  efforts  and  those  of  his 
numerous  followers  and  co-operators  the  general  habit  of 
mind  which  is  developed  by  their  methods  of  work  has 
not  only  penetrated  into  other  regions  of  thought  and 
study,  but  it  is  modifying  and  raising  our  general  stand- 
ard of  truth  even  in  our  practical  daily  life. 


MR.  RUSKIN  AND  THE  SPORTS  AND  PAS- 
TIMES  OF   ENGLAND 

THE  field-sports  and  pastimes  of  Eng- 
land play  so  important  a  part  in  the  life 
of  the  English  people,  and  might  so 
well  serve  as  an  example  to  other  na- 
tions, that  I  do  not  think  the  most  se- 
rious thought  we  may  spend  upon  them 
wasted.  Nay,  I  hold  that  a  serious  treat- 
ment of  the  subject  is  called  for  the  more, 
as  the  weight  of  personality  and  earnest- 
ness of  moral  purpose  which  writers  and 
thinkers  such  as  Mr.  Ruskin  have  thrown 
into  the  scales  may  cause  the  balance  to 
fall  on  what  to  my  mind  is  the  wrong  and 
harmful  side. 

The  first  fallacy  seems  to  me  to  consist 
in  the  view  taken  by  Mr.  Ruskin  and  his 
followers  that  these  sports  are  essential- 
ly characteristic  of  the  upper  or  leisured 


1 7o 

classes  of  England,  as  opposed  to  the 
working  -  classes,  and  in  so  far  act  as  a 
severing  element.  Now,  in  opposition  to 
this  view,  I  strongly  hold  that  these  in- 
stitutions have  occupied  a  conspicuous 
place  in  the  history  of  the  English  people 
as  a  uniting  element:  that  they  have 
brought  the  people  together,  have  given 
a  tangible  unity  of  character  to  the  English 
nation,  and  have  been  one  of  the  most 
important  factors  in  hitherto  mitigating 
the  antagonisms  of  class  feeling  which, 
from  other  conditions  of  life,  might 
have  become  most  marked  and  stereo- 
typed. 

In  the  first  place,  I  deny  that  sport  in 
England  is  in  any  way  limited  to  the  up- 
per or  leisure  classes,  in  contradistinction 
to  the  working  -  classes.  There  may  be 
and  there  no  doubt  are  some  men  who 
do  no  work  (though  both  in  England  and 
America  these  are  not  always  men  who 
take  to  sport) ;  there  are  no  doubt  those 
who  only  live  to  hunt,  and  do  not  hunt 
to  live.  But  it  is  unfair  to  take  this  ex- 
aggerated type  as  the  centre  of  attack 
upon  the  institution  as  a  whole. 


To  begin  with  young  people,  both  in 
the  schools  and  in  the  universities  the 
athlete  and  the  sportsman  are  very  fre- 
quently  the  reading  men  who  work  hard- 
est. This  is  markedly  the  case  in  the 
universities  with  regard  to  rowing  men, 
cricketers,  and  foot -ball  players.  No 
doubt,  both  in  schools  and  universities, 
many  instances  may  be  found  in  which 
the  games  have  been  abnormally  devel- 
oped and  have  received  excessive  consid- 
eration. But  in  every  institution,  however 
good  and  noble  its  purpose,  exaggerations 
and  abnormalities  can  always  be  pointed 
out. 

In  the  later  periods  of  men's  lives,  when 
they  have  left  the  schools  or  the  univer- 
sities, I  would  again  maintain  that  the 
majority  of  the  men  who  play  cricket  or 
foot-ball,  who  row,  who  shoot,  or  fish,  who 
climb  the  Alps,  and  even  those  who  hunt, 
are  busy  men,  hard  workers  in  their  sev- 
eral vocations.  Nothing  but  actual  sta- 
tistics could  absolutely  prove  the  one  or 
the  other  assertion.  But,  from  my  own 
experience  and  the  means  I  have  of  esti- 
mating the  numbers,  I  would  challenge 


I72 

those  who  assert  the  contrary  to  prove 
their  statement. 

I  have  said  "  even  those  who  hunt,"  for, 
from  the  nature  of  this  sport,  it  would  ap- 
pear that  it  might  readily  be  limited  to 
the  few  who  could  devote  a  considerable 
portion  of  their  time  and  energies  to  ride 
in  pursuit  of  the  fox.  Among  a  few  packs 
in  the  midland  counties  of  England,  where, 
from  the  nature  of  this  grass  country  and 
its  fences,  hunting  is  exceptionally  good, 
while  requiring  the  most  expensive  mounts 
to  see  a  good  day's  sport,  there  may  be  a 
large  proportion  of  men  whose  means  are 
so  ample  that  they  would  not  be  forced 
in  any  way  to  exert  themselves  to  provide 
for  their  maintenance.  But  even  there, 
with  these  few  packs  of  hounds,  I  do  not 
think  there  is  a  large  proportion  of  men 
whose  whole  time  is  spent  in  seeking  for 
personal  distraction  and  enjoyment,  and 
who  have  not  some  definite,  serious  voca- 
tion in  life.  But  when  we  leave  these 
packs,  in  considerably  over  a  hundred 
hunts  scattered  over  England  alone,  the 
case  is  a  very  different  one.  We  have  an 
adequate  picture  of  national  life,  and  per- 


haps  national  life  at  its  best.  Many  classes 
are  here  represented.  There  may  be  a 
peer  or  two,  a  few  squires,  farmers,  doc- 
tors, lawyers,  tradesmen,  the  butcher  and 
baker  on  his  horse,  boys  and  girls  on  their 
ponies,  old  men  and  young  men — and  all 
mixing  in  a  spirit  of  comradeship  and 
good-fellowship,  with  the  health -giving 
life  of  a  day  in  the  open  country  on 
horseback  (and  sometimes  off  it),  with 
no  thought  of  the  rivalry  of  clashing  in- 
terests in  the  great  greed  of  gain.  A  for- 
eigner coming  to  England  cannot  under- 
stand this.  His  question  is:  "Who  has 
invited  these  people  ?"  With  him  some 
great  nobleman  would  for  any  similar 
function  have  invited  a  few  select  guests, 
and  admission  into  this  magic  circle  would 
at  once  confer  social  distinction.  But  here 
is  a  real  national  holiday,  and  whoever  de- 
sires to  do  so  can  join  in  the  sport,  and 
will  be  properly  treated  by  all  other  sports- 
men, provided  he  behaves  properly.  The 
rebuke  administered  to  the  successful 
London  tailor  who  had  taken  to  hunting 
will  illustrate  the  spirit  in  which  any  at- 
tempt at  establishing  exclusiveness  is  met. 


174 

This  sportsman -tailor  was  riding  home 
after  a  day's  hunt  with  a  well  -  known 
duke,  and  after  commenting  upon  the 
day's  sport,  he  remarked  to  his  noble 
companion  that  the  company  was  rather 
mixed.  "  You  wouldn't  have  them  all  tai- 
lors, would  you?"  was  the  duke-s  reply. 

We  must  feel  that  in  this  respect  the 
conditions  of  "  shooting  "  in  England  are 
unfavorable. 

In  the  first  place,  from  the  nature  of 
land-tenure  and  of  the  distribution  of 
game,  the  opportunities  of  shooting  are 
limited  to  a  great  extent  to  people  of  con- 
siderable wealth.  It  is  more  and  more 
becoming  the  sport  of  the  rich  in  this 
densely  populated  country.  Then  it  dif- 
fers from  hunting  and  most  sports  and 
games  in  that  only  a  limited  number  of 
people  or  "  guns  "  can  take  part  in  any 
shooting -party;  and  such  parties  are 
thus  closely  defined  and  distinct  from 
the  less  fortunate  lovers  of  sport.  And, 
finally,  considerable  ill-feeling  has  been 
engendered,  on  the  one  hand,  by  the  strict 
preserving  of  whole  districts  and  the 
quarrels  to  which  it  leads ;  on  the  other 


hand,  by  the  numerous  cases  of  severe 
judgments  passed  by  magistrates  upon 
the  offenders  against  the  game-laws. 

Against  these  facts  it  may  be  urged 
that  the  rich  landlord  does  not  shoot  in 
solitary  state,  but  that  he  invites  a  num- 
ber of  people  who  could  not  afford  to  keep 
up  preserves  themselves,  representing  the 
various  classes  and  occupations  ;  that  re- 
cent legislation  concerning  "  hares  or  rab- 
bits" has  given  extensive  rights  to  the 
tenant-farmer ;  and  that  there  would  very 
soon  be  no  game  at  all  in  England  if  there 
were  not  those  to  preserve  it. 

In  spite  of  what  may  be  said,  the  fact 
remains  that  this  form  of  sport  is  more 
likely  to  act  as  a  severing  element  than 
the  other  games  and  sports,  and  that  it 
certainly  does  not  in  the  same  way  tend 
to  unite  the  classes.  Still  the  conditions 
are  accidental  and  not  essential  to  the 
sport  itself. 

But  taking  the  sports  and  pastimes  as 
a  whole  I  am  convinced  of  their  influence 
in  binding  the  classes  together  rather  than 
severing  them.  The  fact  that  England  is 
and  has  been  more  consistently  and  con- 


1 76 


tinuously  aristocratic  in  constitution  than 
any  other  country  in  Europe,  and  at  the 
same  time  in  its  actual  national  character 
in  many  aspects  more  democratic,  is,  I 
maintain,  in  great  part  due  to  the  existence 
of  these  games  and  pastimes.  They  .pro- 
vide for  the  people  as  a  whole  a  common 
language  and  a  field  of  mutual  under- 
standing and  sympathy,  so  that  the  aris- 
tocrat has  not  become  estranged  from  the 
simple  laboring  man  to  the  same  degree 
as  in  Germany.  The  British  laborer,  the 
artisan,  the  villager,  the  tradesman,  the 
soldier  and  sailor,  have  all  become  infused 
with  this  modern  survival  of  chivalry, 
which  is  to  a  great  degree  wanting,  say 
in  the  German,  his  nearest  in  kin  in  Eu- 
rope. The  village  cricket-field,  the  foot- 
ball match,  the  rowing  race,  the  games  in 
the  regiments  and  among  the  crews  and 
officers  of  a  man-of-war,  the  hunting- 
field — all  these  are  places  where  the  differ- 
ent classes  have  met  in  common  spirit 
and  with  comparative  freedom  and  inti- 
macy. When  the  manifestations  of  physi- 
cal strength  and  skill  become  the  main 
central  object  of  exertion,  evoking  inter- 


est  and  bringing  p.  estige,  there  is  no 
chance  to  obtrude  or  to  maintain  the  set 
differences  of  class.  The  village  hobble- 
dehoy who  plays  well  in  a  good  match 
becomes  a  hero  for  the  day  along  with 
the  young  peer,  the  private  soldier  no 
less  than  his  officer,  and  the  butcher  who 
"  rides  straight  "  as  well  as  the  master  of 
hounds.  And  so  it  is  in  every  sphere  of 
this  healthy  physical  life. 

Without  these  institutions,  what  would 
the  English  schools  be  ?  The  danger  that 
the  poison  of  snobbishness  which  ema- 
nates from  such  social  centres  as  London 
might  vitiate  the  early  impressionable  nat- 
ure of  boys  is  very  great.  But,  though 
the  exaggeration  of  athleticism  may  cre- 
ate a  school-snobbishness  of  its  own,  still 
this  new  physical  criterion  of  estimation 
established  among  boys  is  a  healthy  coun- 
teractant  in  early  youth  to  the  effects  of  a 
worldly  society  in  after  life.  The  same 
applies  to  the  universities  in  which  the 
range  of  these  causes  of  distinction  is 
healthily  widened  by  deeper  and  more 
lasting  objects  of  estimation.  But  all 
these  influences  join  to  counteract  the 


i78 


stereotyping  of  social  classes  based  upon 
wealth  or  other  adventitious  grounds. 
Outside  England  the  fact  can  hardly  be 
realized  that  in  the  schools  there  are  foot- 
ball matches  between  the  masters  and  the 
pupils,  that  in  the  colleges  of  the  great 
universities  there  are  matches  between 
the  members  and  "  dons  "  of  a  college  and 
the  college  servants.  J\nd  surely  we  need 
not  insist  upon  the  fact  that  such  inter- 
course, though  not  affecting  the  discipline 
necessary  for  the  practical  purposes  of 
life,  is  most  salutary  in  bringing  together 
and  in  effecting  a  healthy  rapprochement 
among  these  distinct  bodies  of  men. 

No  two  Englishmen,  though  they  be 
of  the  opposite  poles  in  the  social  world, 
need  be  at  a  loss  to  find  a  common 
ground  of  conversation  if  they  both  take 
interest  in  some  form  of  sport.  And  it 
would  be  difficult  to  find  an  Englishman, 
to  whatever  class  he  may  belong,  who, 
from  bicycle-riding,  or  foot-ball,  or  row- 
ing, or  sailing,  or  fishing,  or  hunting  on- 
ward, does  not  take  some  interest  in  one 
or  the  other  of  these  athletic  games. 

Of  course  national  life  would  be  still 


more  perfect  if  the  highly-educated  man 
could  converse  with  the  country-laborer 
about  the  latest  literary  publication  or  the 
different  divisions  of  intellectual  work. 
In  this  the  Germans,  from  the  long  tradi- 
tion of  their  school  education,  are  far 
ahead  of  the  English.  The  writer  can  re- 
member with  what  pleased  surprise  he 
listened  to  the  landlord  of  a  small  inn  of 
a  remote  hamlet  in  the  Black  Forest, 
when  he  visited  this  district  on  a  tramp 
during  his  student  days  at  a  German 
university.  This  peasant  (for  such  he  was) 
at  once  asked  us  whether  we  belonged  to 
the  juridical,  philosophical,  or  theological 
faculties,  or  whether  we  were  students  of 
medicine.  He  had  a  clear  notion  of  the 
distinctions  between  the  different  lines 
of  university  study,  and  fully  realized  the 
theoretical  aspect  and  worth  of  higher 
scientific  pursuits.  One  could  hardly 
meet  with  such  a  man  in  England.  But 
in  Germany  there  would  be  no  bond  of 
sympathy  in  that  region  of  life  and  inter- 
est to  which  sport  belongs.  While  ac- 
knowledging that  the  presence  of  both 
elements  of  union  is  necessary  for  a  per- 


i8o 


feet  national  life,  we  must  at  the  same 
time  rejoice  that  in  England  we  can  at 
least  point  to  the  existence  of  one. 

The  Germans  do  not  possess  this  spirit 
on  which  chivalry  rests:  the  emotional 
and  physical  sympathy  arising  out  of  the 
near  intercourse  of  men  joined  together 
by  the  free  and  expansive  spirit  of  phys- 
ical play.  And  this  implies  a  communion 
and  acquaintance  which  common  intellec- 
tual interests  cannot  supply.  We  can  sym- 
pathize with  the  Irish  officer  in  an  Eng- 
lish regiment,  who,  on  being  reproached 
by  his  brother  officers  for  talking  volubly 
and  at  length  with  an  Irish  visitor,  whereas 
he  did  not  converse  freely  with  them,  an- 
swered :  "  Sure,  and  he  knew  a  hoss  that 
I  was  acquointed  with."  The  Oriental, 
when  he  wishes  to  express  the  fact  that 
he  knows  a  man  intimately,  says,  "  I  have 
travelled  with  him."  We  might  with  the 
same  object  say,  "  He  was  in  the  eleven 
with  me." 

We  can  hardly  overestimate  the  train- 
ing which  those  who  fill  the  humbler 
walks  of  life  in  the  country  in  England 
have  gained  from  this  intercourse  with 


those  who  have  had  better  opportunities 
for  refined  training.  It  has  improved  their 
manners,  it  has  increased  their  pluck  and 
self-control,  it  has  refined  their  social 
feeling.  Nay,  the  "  professionals  "  in  Eng- 
land, those  who  have  made  a  business  of 
games,  especially  cricket,  have  often  over- 
come the  dangers  which  attend  such  ex- 
clusive occupation,  and  have  maintained 
a  higher  and  more  refined  standard  of 
life  by  the  aid  of  their  constant  associa- 
tion with  men  of  high  and  noble  character 
who  cultivate  these  games  in  England. 

Even  horse-racing  has  furnished  a  bond 
of  sympathy  between  all  classes  of  the 
people  in  England  and  Ireland.  No  one 
could  deplore  more  the  base  mercenary 
element  of  betting,  which  has  become  at 
times  almost  indissolubly  connected  with 
this  sport.  It  is  so  great  an  evil  as  to 
counterbalance  all  the  good  that  the  in- 
stitution itself  undoubtedly  possesses ;  and 
one  would  like  to  see  it  swept  away,  to 
avoid  the  accidental  evil  which  has  pene- 
trated into  the  very  heart  of  its  life.  But 
as  regards  the  interest  in  the  racing  itself, 
one  need  but  go  to  the  Derby  or  to 


1 82 


Punchestown  in  Ireland  to  see  what  a 
national  binding  element  it  is. 

I  feel  sure  that  the  most  patriotic  and 
far-sighted  of  the  Germans,  their  present 
emperor  at  the  head,  would  make  any 
sacrifice,  if  they  could  but  create  the  same 
intense  interest  in  the  whole  of  the  Ger- 
man people  as  now  moves  England  when 
the  sixteen  representatives  of  the  two 
great  universities  vie  with  one  another 
in  their  annual  boat-race. 

Surely  these  institutions  do  not  keep 
the  classes  asunder.  The  wrong  comes, 
and  the  hateful  side  is  turned  uppermost, 
when  men  cultivate  these  sports  to  gain 
social  distinction  by  them,  and  to  impress 
their  less  fortunate  neighbors  with  the 
advantages  which  material  accidents  have 
placed  in  their  own  way.  I  maintain  that 
these  are  not  real  sportsmen,  as  little  as 
the  long-haired  aesthete  who  consciously 
draws  a  distinction  between  himself  and 
the  less  fortunate  Philistine  is  a  real  lover 
of  art. 

It  is  wrong  to  create  artificial  antago- 
nisms and  to  counteract  what  is,  when 
soberly  and  impartially  considered,  one 


of  the  greatest  boons  in  these  not  too 
bright  times  of  ours. 

And  if  now  we  consider  the  influence 
of  these  institutions  upon  the  individual 
man  in  maintaining  and  increasing  physi- 
cal and  moral  health  of  normal  life,  I  would 
here  again  hold  them  to  be  the  greatest 
boon  to  England.  When  Jorrocks  calls 
hunting :  "  The  sport  of  kings,  the  image 
of  war  without  its  guilt,  and  only  five- 
and- twenty  per  cent,  of  its  danger," 
the  jesting  tone  cannot  wholly  hide  the 
deep  truth  that  lies  beneath.  These 
games  and  sports  cultivate  the  physical 
side  of  our  soul,  our  pluck,  power  of  emo- 
tiveness  and  vigor  of  impulse,  together 
with  the  potency  of  self-control.  We  can- 
not conceive  of  a  perfect  man  without 
physical  courage.  It  is  true  the  question 
may  be  asked  whether,  by  directing  our 
minds  and  bodies  into  other  channels  that 
have  no  taint  of  the  savageness  of  the 
prehistoric  man,  we  cannot  equally  fortify 
this  impulse  to  action  and  feeling  and 
thought.  It  is  true  it  may  require  as 
great  an  expenditure  of  will-power,  of  self- 
control,  of  pluck,  or  whatever  else  we 


1 84 


might  call  it,  to  check  the  impulse  of  irri- 
tation in  our  ordinary  life  and  intercourse, 
or  to  force  ourselves  to  do  a  small,  hum- 
ble piece  of  work,  when  indolence  drags 
us  the  other  way,  as  it  requires  to  scale  a 
high  mountain  or  to  face  a  stiff  fence  in 
the  hunting-  field.  But  I  do  not  think  that 
in  these  complex  calls  upon  our  inner 
nervous  system  which  ordinary  civilized 
life  in  towns  and  rooms  brings  to  us 
we  obtain  so  pure  and  direct  a  training 
of  the  side  of  our  nature  which  corre- 
sponds to  physical  courage  as  in  those  oc- 
cupations which  are  purely  and  directly 
the  outcome  of  undepraved  physical  vi- 
tality. 

We  do  not  wish  to  return  to  the 
prehistoric  savage.  We  have  certainly 
"evolved"  out  of  those  primary  condi- 
tions of  man's  soul,  as  we  have  "  evolved  " 
out  of  those  conditions  of  life.  But, 
"evolve"  as  much  as  we  may,  and  as 
high  as  we  can,  out  of  the  stage  of  savage 
man,  we  cannot  conceive,  within  appre- 
ciable time,  our  "evolving"  away  from 
the  conditions  of  man.  And  as  yet,  in  all 
our  conceptions  of  the  most  perfect  man — 


even  for  the  remote  future — the  element 
of  physical  courage,  of  0vpo$,  as  Plato 
would  call  it,  is  an  essential  factor.  And 
I  maintain  emphatically  that  there  is  no 
sphere  in  which  these  virtues  can  be  more 
efficiently  and  beneficially  cultivated  and 
fostered  than  in  the  exercise  of  games 
and  sports.  The  vicious  impulse  of  an- 
tagonism, which,  from  the  instinct  of 
self-preservation,  seems  to  be  imbedded 
in  man,  which  led  to  the  fight  and  the 
slaughter  of  his  fellow-men;  the  almost 
savage  predominance  of  other  emotions 
and  passions  which,  though  blended  with 
our  highest  and  noblest  impulses,  may  de- 
stroy their  nobility  and  bring  misery  upon 
our  fellow-beings — these  are  led  into  more 
harmless  channels,  are  subdued  to  their 
right  and  healthy  measure,  and,  without 
the  barren  attempts  at  extirpation  which 
bring  disease  to  the  soul's  life,  they  are 
subordinated,  as  parts  of  an  organic  ex- 
istence, to  the  highest  aim  of  the  life  of 
every  human  being. 

It  !s  especially  the  intellectual  man,  the 
brain-worker,  who  often  neglects  this  side 
of  his  life  until  the  prevailing  nevrose 


1 86 


eats  at  the  heart  of  his  soul's  forces.  He 
it  is  whom  we  ought  to  meet  in  the  hunt- 
ing-field, on  the  river,  at  cricket  and  foot- 
ball. And,  fortunately,  in  no  country  more 
than  in  England  are  these  men  votaries 
of  these  noble  pastimes.  But  it  is  not  only 
in  this  quasi-utilitarian  spirit,  in  which  we 
regard  these  forms  of  play  simply  as  means 
to  fit  us  the  better  for  the  more  serious 
tasks  of  life,  that  I  wish  to  view  them : 
they  are  a  direct  end  in  themselves.  We 
do  not  wish  to  join  the  "  liver  brigade  " 
who  ride  in  the  park  in  the  morning  to 
regulate  their  digestion.  We  wish  to  see 
young  and  healthy  people  riding  for  the 
pleasure  of  riding,  and  not  only  to  fit  them 
for  work.  Mr.  Ruskin  has  in  one  passage 
entered  into  the  spirit  and  the  nature  of 
play  when,  in  the  Crown  of  Wild  Olive, 
page  20,  he  says  :  "  First,  then,  of  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  classes  who  work 
and  the  classes  who  play.  Of  course  we 
must  agree  upon  a  definition  of  these 
terms — work  and  play — before  going  fur- 
ther. Now,  roughly,  not  with  vain  sub- 
tlety of  definition,  but  for  plain  use  of 
the  words,  '  play '  is  an  exertion  of  body 


i87 


or  mind,  made  to  please  ourselves,  and 
with  no  determined  end ;  and  work  is  a 
thing  done  because  it  ought  to  be  done, 
and  with  a  determined  end.  You  play,  as 
you  call  it,  at  cricket,  for  instance.  That 
is  as  hard  work  as  anything  else ;  but  it 
amuses  you,  and  it  has  no  result  but  the 
amusement.  If  it  were  done  as  an  ordered 
form  of  exercise,  for  health's  sake,  it  would 
become  work  directly.  So,  in  like  man- 
ner, whatever  we  do  to  please  ourselves, 
and  only  for  the  sake  of  the  pleasure,  not 
for  an  ultimate  object,  is '  play,'  the  '  pleas- 
ing thing,'  not  the  useful  thing.  Play  may 
be  useful  in  a  secondary  sense  (nothing  is 
indeed  more  useful  or  necessary) ;  but  the 
use  of  it  depends  on  its  being  spontane- 
ous." 

The  general  tenor,  however,  of  his  re- 
marks upon  play,  especially  the  field 
sports,  is  in  direct  opposition  to  this 
view.  When,  for  instance,  in  another 
passage  in  the  Fors,  he  says  that,  "  if  in- 
stead of  taking  the  quantity  of  exercise 
made  necessary  to  their  bodies  by  God, 
they  take  it  in  hunting  or  shooting,  they 
become  ignorant,  irreligious,  and  finally 


1 88 


insane,  and  seek  to  live  by  fighting  as 
well  as  by  hunting ;  whence  the  type  of 
Nimrod  in  the  circle  of  the  Hell  towers 
which  I  desire  you  to  study  in  Dante." 

He  objects  to  these  games  on  the 
ground  of  waste,  and  would  like  to  see 
the  energy  and  money  now  spent  in  them 
turned  into  more  immediately  productive 
channels.  It  is  especially'  against  hunt- 
ing and  shooting  that  his  opposition  is 
aroused.  Thus  he  says  again,  in  the  Fors, 
"  Our  next  English  game  (he  has  been 
speaking  of  money -making  as  the  first 
game),  however,  hunting  and  shooting,  is 
costly  altogether,  and  how  much  we  are 
fined  for  it  annually  in  land,  horses,  game- 
keepers, and  game-laws,  and  all  else  that 
accompanies  that  beautiful  and  special 
English  game,  I  will  not  endeavor  to 
count  now :  but  not  only  that,  except  for 
exercise,  this  is  not  merely  a  useless  game, 
but  a  deadly  one  to  all  connected  with 
it.  .  .  ." 

And,  again,  his  letter  on  the  subject  of 
fox-hunting,  to  the  Daily  Telegraph,  of 
London,  republished  in  the  Arrows  of  the 
Chase,  p.  118  :  "  Reprobation  of  fox-hunt- 


ing  on  the  ground  of  cruelty  to  the  fox  is 
entirely  futile.  More  pain  is  caused  to 
the  draught-horses  of  London  in  an  hour 
by  avariciously  overloading  them  than  to 
all  the  foxes  in  England  by  the  hunts  of 
the  year;  and  the  rending  of  body  and 
heart  in  human  death,  caused  by  neglect, 
in  our  country  cottages,  in  any  one  win- 
ter, could  not  be  equalled  by  the  death- 
pangs  of  any  quantity  of  foxes. 

"  The  real  evils  of  fox-hunting  are  that 
it  wastes  the  time,  misapplies  the  energy, 
exhausts  the  wealth,  narrows  the  capacity* 
debases  the  taste,  and  abates  the  honor 
of  the  upper  classes  of  this  country ;  and, 
instead  of  keeping,  as  your  correspondent 
'  Forester '  supposes, '  thousands  from  the 
workhouse,'  it  sends  thousands  of  the. 
poor  both  there  and  into  the  grave. 

"  The  athletic  training  given  by  fox- 
hunting is  excellent ;  and  such  training 
is  vitally  necessary  to  the  upper  classes. 
But  it  ought  always  to  be  in  real  service 
to  their  country ;  in  personal  agricultural 
labor  at  the  head  of  their  tenantry,  and 
in  extending  English  life  and  dominion 
in  waste  regions  against  the  adverse  pow- 


ers  of  nature.  Let  them  become  Captains 
of  Emigration,  hunt  down  the  foxes  that 
spoil  the  Vineyard  of  the  World,  and  keep 
their  eyes  on  the  leading  hound  in  Packs 
of  Men." 

Mr.  Ruskin's  practical  experiment  while 
he  was  at  Oxford  to  direct  the  surplus 
energy  of  healthy  men  into  what  he  con- 
sidered the  proper  channels  is  well  known. 
He  endeavored  to  persuade  the  serious- 
minded  young  students  of  Oxford  that, 
instead  of  expending  their  energies  in 
games,  they  should  find  their  physical 
amusement  in  making  roads  and  doing 
other  manifestly  useful  tasks  in  the  open 
air. 

Now  I  maintain  that  these  views  are 
based  upon  the  fundamental  misunder- 
standing of  the  nature  of  play — of  its  posi- 
tion in  the  economical  as  well  as  generally 
in  the  ethical  life  of  the  healthy  civilized 
man  of  modern  times — a  misunderstand- 
ing strange  in  view  of  the  correct  defini- 
tion of  play  quoted  above. 

From  an  economical  point  of  view,  I 
claim  that  the  needs  which  the  games 
supply  are  for  us  as  fundamental  as  any 


of  the  other  goods  of  life.  Nor  do  I  see 
how  their  cessation  throughout  a  country 
like  England  could  be  in  any  way  a  reme- 
dy for  the  economical  diseases,  the  causes 
of  which  lie  much  deeper,  and  cannot  be 
palliated  by  their  disuse.  Even  if  it  could 
be  shown  that  by  the  complete  destruc- 
tion of  these  institutions  an  appreciable 
amount  of  sustenance  or  comfort  could 
be  distributed  among  all  the  individual 
members  of  a  community,  I  should  say 
that  our  community,  or  country,  or  age 
would,  as  a  whole,  be  impoverished  in  the 
resources  of  its  life.  If  we  were  to  turn 
all  our  capital  and  efforts  into  the  direc- 
tion of  producing  wheat  ^and  potatoes, 
there  is  no  doubt  we  might  produce  more 
wheat  and  potatoes  ;  but  what  would  be- 
come of  the  flower-gardens  and  the  wild- 
flowers,  so  injurious  to  the  farmer's  hay 
crop,  but  for  the  preservation  of  which 
Mr.  Ruskin  is  such  a  warm  advocate.  He 
likes  flower-gardens,  others  like  fox-hunt- 
ing, others  like  both  ;  and  the  world  is  the 
richer  for  their  tastes.  He  is  wrong  when 
he  makes  the  absurd  and  unfair  compari- 
son between  the  life  suggested  by  the 


picture  of  a  mediaeval  Madonna  and  a 
caricatured  account  of  modern  sport,  and 
when  he  says  (Fors,  letter  xxiv.)  :  "  Of 
course  all  this  is  quite  natural  to  a  sport- 
ing people  who  have  learned  to  like  the 
smell  of  gunpowder,  sulphur,  gas-tar,  bet- 
ter than  that  of  violets  and  thyme.  But, 
putting  the  baby-poisoning,  pigeon-shoot- 
ing, and  rabbit-shooting  of  to-day  in  com- 
parison with  the  pleasures  of  the  German 
Madonna  and  her  simple  company,  and 
of  Chaucer  and  his  carolling  company," 
etc.,  etc.  If  he  wishes  to  inveigh  against 
pigeon-shooting  or  unsportsmanlike  rab- 
bit-shooting, let  him  do  it ;  or  if  he  wishes 
to  praise  the  simplicity  of  life  suggested 
by  these  mediaeval  types,  he  can  do  it  elo- 
quently. But  why  indulge  in  this  un- 
called-for and  distorting  juxtaposition 
and  contrast !  He  is  thus  wrong,  both 
theoretically  and  practically,  when  he  puts 
in  glaring  opposition  the  misery  and  the 
material  wants  of  the  destitute ;  when, 
after  giving  a  harrowing  picture  of  the 
misery  in  poor  London,  he  says,  "  And 
the  double  and  treble  horror  of  all  this, 
note  you  well,  is  that  not  only  the  tennis- 


playing  and  railroad  -  flying  public  trip 
round  the  outskirts  of  it,"  etc.,  etc. 

If  the  very  foundations  of  our  whole 
economical  and  social  life  are  to  be  al- 
tered so  as  to  right  the  wrongs  and  to 
equalize  the  cruel  inequalities  in  our 
midst,  then  the  right-minded  among  us 
will  be  prepared  for  this,  and  will  hail 
with  joy  any  reforms  which  would  bring 
justice  into  the  world.  But  meanwhile 
let  us  not  impoverish  the  world  and  lower 
our  ideals  of  perfect  life,  moral,  intellec- 
tual, and  physical.  The  world  without 
"  tennis  "  would  be  the  poorer  for  it. 

If  such  reasoning  is  fallacious  econom- 
ically, it  is  still  more  so  ethically  and  as 
regards  the  proper  understanding  of  the 
essential  nature  of  play.  Play  is  to  our 
physical  life  what  art  is  to  our  intellectual 
and  moral  life.  Both  arise  out  of  the 
healthy  vigor  of  human  society  that  has 
risen  beyond  the  stage  of  animal  instincts 
and  barbarity.  When  man 's  thoughts  and 
exertions  are  not  merely  bent  upon  self- 
preservation  and  production  of  the  mere 
necessaries  for  physical  subsistence,  his 
healthy  mind  and  his  healthy  body  turn 


to  spheres  where  there  is  exertion  (not 
passive  vegetating  existence)  which  re- 
freshes and  elevates,  and  has  no  ulterior 
object.  Active  exertion,  in  which  action 
itself  becomes  the  end,  without  further  re- 
flection and  remote  considerations,  which 
would  counteract  and  vitiate  the  reviving 
influence  of  such  activity — this  leads  to 
art  and  to  play.  The  mind  revels  in  the 
contemplation  of  the  beauties  of  nature 
or  in  a  picture,  or  a  statue,  or  a  poem,  or 
a  drama,  or  a  symphony,  or  a  beautiful 
tower,  as  the  body  revels  in  a  brisk  walk 
in  the  country,  in  a  swift  ride  on  a  bicycle, 
in  a  fast  pull  on  the  river,  in  a  good  game 
of  cricket,  of  base-ball,  of  foot-ball,  or  a 
good  run  across  country.  As  modern  civ- 
ilized society  has  evolved  art,  and  needs 
it,  as  the  civilized  and  properly  educated 
man  and  woman  require  the  satisfaction 
of  the  aesthetic  side  of  their  soul,  in  order 
that  it  shall  be  healthy ;  so  civilized  life 
has  developed  those  games  and  sports, 
and  the.  healthy  man  and  woman  require 
the  satisfaction  of  their  physical  vitality 
in  these  directions,  in  order  that  they  may 
remain  sound  and  normal  beings.  And, 


195 

as  Mr.  Ruskin  himself  has  recognized,  to 
add  an  ulterior  aim  of  utility  to  such  ef- 
forts destroys  the  very  essential  nature  of 
these  acts.  Road -making,  excepting  in 
the  first  few  attempts,  when  it  is  looked 
upon  as  a  "  joke,"  cannot  satisfy  that  side 
of  our  nature  which  makes  for  play. 

Mr.  Ruskin's  opposition  to  these  games 
and  sports  can,  I  believe,  be  easily  ex- 
plained in  him  :  they  come,  on  the  one 
hand,  from  what  I  have  called  his  ethical 
bias,  on  the  other  hand  from  his  roman- 
ticism. To  our  mind  his  ethical  bias  has 
even  vitiated  his  proper  conception  of  art. 
Still  more  can  we  feel  how  his  earnest 
sympathy  with  men  of  all  ranks,  his  deep 
pity  for  misery,  his  passionate  resentment 
of  the  wrongs  which  strike  great  classes 
of  men,  should  have  made  him  overshoot 
the  mark  and  ignore  the  good  which  lies 
in  so  simple  a  phase  of  human  existence 
as  is  covered  by  the  idea  of  play.  And  it 
is  always  an  ungracious  task  to  plead  for 
what  may  appear  trite  in  the  light  of  the 
great  absorbing  issues  of  a  lofty  human 
life,  to  sound  the  gentle  pipe  when  there 
is  the  blast  of  the  trumpet  in  our  ears,  to 


hang  one's  simple  picture  of  a  country 
lane  in  the  morning  mist,  green  and  gray 
and  light  blue,  beside  the  great  imagery 
of  the  setting  sun  in  all  his  golden,  crim- 
son, purple  glory,  or  beside  the  picture 
of  a  battle-scene  with  a  blood-red  back- 
ground to  it.  But  from  the  point  of 
view  of  completeness,  normality,  and 
health  of  social  life,  the  claims  of  the 
one  have  the  same  right  as  those  of  the 
other. 

Mr.  Ruskin's  romanticism  shows  itself 
in  his  treatment  of  sport,  especially  in  the 
manner  in  which  he  approaches  some 
forms  of  it.  ,  So,  for  instance,  in  Fors,  vol. 
i.,  p.  119,  he  speaks  of  riding  and  sailing: 
"  You  little  know  how  much  is  implied  in 
the  two  conditions  of  boys'  education 
that  I  gave  you  in  my  last  letter — that 
they  shall  all  learn  either  to  ride  or  sail : 
nor  by  what  constancy  of  law  the  power 
of  highest  discipline  and  honor  is  vested 
by  nature  in  the  two  chivalries — of  the 
Horse  and  the  Wave.  Both  are  signifi- 
cative of  the  right  command  of  man  over 
his  own  passions ;  but  they  teach,  further, 
the  strange  mystery  of  relation  that  exists 


between  his  soul  and  the  wild  natural  ele- 
ments on  the  one  hand  and  the  wild  lower 
animals  on  the  other." 
,  He  then  dwells  upon  the  gentleness  of 
chivalry,  and  quotes  the  Iliad  for  the  con- 
ception of  the  horse,  there  manifested  in 
the  sorrow  of  the  divine  horses  at  the 
death  of  Patroclus.  "  Is  not  that  a  pret- 
tier notion  (p.  120)  of  horses  than  you  will 
get  from  your  betting  English  chivalry  on 
the  Derby  day?  We  will  have,  please 
Heaven,  some  riding,  not  as  jockeys  ride, 
and  some  sailing,  not  as  pots  and  kettles 
sail,  once  more  on  English  land  and  sea ; 
and  out  of  both,  kindled  yet  again,  the 
chivalry  of  heart  of  the  Knight  of  Athens, 
and  Eques  of  Rome,  and  Ritter  of  Ger- 
many, and  Chevalier  of  France,  and  Cav- 
alier of  England — chivalry  gentle  always 
and  lowly,  among  those  who  deserved 
their  name  of  knight ;  showing  mercy  to 
whom  mercy  was  due,  and  honor  to  whom 
honor." 

See  further  the  definition  of  a  squire  : 
"first  it  means  a  rider;  or,  in  more  full 
and  perfect  sense,  a  governor  of  beasts, 
.  .  .  which  is  the  primal  meaning  of  chiv- 


i98 


airy,  the  horse,  as  the  noblest,  because 
trainablest,  of  wild  creatures,  being  taken 
for  a  type  of  them  all."  And  further 
(Fors,  Ixxv.,  p.  415),  "  And  of  all  essential 
things  in  a  gentleman's  bodily  and  men- 
tal training,  this  is  really  the  beginning — 
that  he  should  have  close  companionship 
with  the  horse,  the  dog,  and  the  eagle. 
Of  all  birthrights  and  bookrights — this  is 
his  first.  He  needn't  be  a  Christian — 
there  have  been  millions  of  Pagan  gen- 
tlemen ;  he  needn't  be  kind — there  have 
been  millions  of  cruel  gentlemen ;  he 
needn't  be  honest — there  have  been  mill- 
ions of  crafty  gentlemen.  He  needn't 
know  how  to  read,  or  to  write  his  own 
name.  But  he  must  have  horse,  dog,  and 
eagle  for  friends.  If,  then,  he  has  also 
Man  for  his  friend,  he  is  a  noble  gentle- 
man ;  and  if  God  for  his  friend,  a  king. 
And  if,  being  honest,  being  kind,  and  hav- 
ing God  and  Man  for  his  friends,  he  then 
gets  these  three  brutal  friends,  besides  his 
angelic  ones,  he  is  perfect  in  earth,  as  for 
heaven.  For,  to  be  his  friends,  these 
must  be  brought  up  with  him,  and  he 
with  them.  Falcon  on  fist,  hound  at 


foot,  and  horse  part  of  himself — Eques^ 
Ritter,  Cavalier,  Chevalier. 

"  Yes  ;  horse  and  dog  you  understand 
the  good  of ;  but  what's  the  good  of  the 
falcon,  think  you  ? 

"  To  be  friends  with  the  falcon  must 
mean  that  you  love  to  see  it  soar ;  that  is 
to  say,  you  love  fresh  air  and  the  fields." 

Here  we  no  doubt  have  love  of  the 
horse,  and  of  animals,  and  of  fresh  air, 
and  of  exercise.  But  Mr.  Ruskin  will 
forgive  me  if  I  venture  really  to  doubt 
whether  it  is  not  in  the  clothing  of  the 
mediaeval  palfrey  that  he  actually  loves 
the  steed.  I  do  not  think  that  he  in  his 
heart  loves  the  horse  as  a  rider  loves  him. 
His  words  involuntarily  make  me  believe 
that  it  is  not  the  habit  of  mind  formed  by 
the  boy  whose  taste  for  sport  is  bred  in 
his  early  games  with  other  boys  in  the 
open  field ;  but  it  smacks  of  the  nursery 
and  the  school-room,  perhaps  the  garden  ; 
and  the  chase  and  the  hunt  have  a  flavor 
of  the  in-door  dust  which  comes  from  the 
books  on  the  shelf,  with  their  accounts 
of  the  knight  and  the  tourney.  One  who 
would  measure  sport  by  the  exploits  of 


the  Knight,  the  Ritter,  the  -Eques,  the 
Cavalier,  the  Chevalier,  can  feel  no  sym- 
pathy (if  he  does  not  feel  antipathy)  with 
a  modern  gentleman  in  top-hat,  breeches 
made  by  Tautz,  and  boots  by  Peel. 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN     INITIAL     FINE     OF    25    CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  5O  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $I.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


APR    15  1933 

f>  I '  "       'A 

AUG   10    1938 
JUL  6   19. 


7  Marl 


PA 


APR  23 


JAN1I1954LU 

0.       8Jul'57FK[; 

REC'D  LD 

i  25  1957 


USE 

U.  C.  BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


